Further Studies In A Dying Culture

FURTHER

STUDIES IN A
DYING CULTURE

CHRISTOPHER CAUDWELL

edited and with a preface by
EDGELL RICKWORD

London

THE BODLEY HEAD

First published 1949

This book IS copyright No poi tion of it
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Printed in Gieat Biitain by

SCOTTISH COUNTY PRtSS, DALKEITH
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CONTENTS

PREFACE 7

1 TFIE BREATH OF DISCONTENT: A Study

in Bourgeois Religion 1 5

2 beauty: a Study in Bourgeois Aesthetics 11

3 MEN AND NATURE*. A Study m Bowgeois

History 1 1 6

4 consciousness: A Study in Bourgeois o

Psychology 156

5 REALITY A Study in Bourgeois Philosophy 210

PREFACE

F or those who pick up a book by Christopher Caudwell
for the first time it is necessary to say that m 1937, when
a young man of 29, he met his death m action against
General Franco’s Moorish troops. It is necessary to state
this, because one of the leading themes of these essays is
the umty of thinking and doing, the nuUity of either in
isolation. Caudwell did not stand ‘dreaming on the verge
of strife,’ nor did he plunge into struggle without thought.
His was consciously a different species of activity ‘Philoso-
phers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various
ways. The point however is to change it.’ And for this
young Englishman in 1936, as for so many generous hearted
men and women all over the globe, the focal point of world
change was the war between the Spanish Government and
the internationally aided rebels. The philosopher, the lover
of knowledge, could not but turn soldier in a struggle in
which the forces of enlightenment and of obscurantism
were so starkly opposed.

A decade of intensive experience lay behind Caudwell
when he made his fateful decision. Those were years in
which the existence of crisis was brought home to all but
the most butterfly-minded. On all sides theories were pro-
pounded to account for the fact that hungry men and empty
factories existed alongside men g^hose unsatisfied elemental
needs those factories and workless men could have supplied.
Economics was promoted the queen of sciences, but so many
rival factions contended for the throne that the man in the

7

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

street cursed them all equally heartily, for their words
brought neither parsnips nor butter

Caudwell had certainly an insatiable intellectual curiosity,
a consuming Faustian ambition to master all the sciences
But whatever one studied m those days, the course of events
always dragged back the attention to the realisation of
economics, the material reproduction of our means of exis-
tence, as the basis of social organisation. It is a measure
of the fantastic existence to which our minds were, and
perhaps are, fashioned that such a self-evident proposition
should rouse deep resentment and stimulate a counter-
polemic of m 3 ^stification, of juggling with sonorous ab-
stractions

When the garish boom of the late 20’s suddenly collapsed
into slump, with its lengthening queues of unemployed, the
respective merits of those who claimed oracular status
became of more than academic interest and for the first time
in this' country on a considerable scale, the students and the
white-collar workers found themselves as helpless as the
worker in industry. The paradox of modern society, the
impoverishment brought about by the most stupendous
technological achievement, thrust itself, however unwelcome
there, even into the millionaire’s Press. Whilst as a tem-
porary measure of alleviation food and industrial crops were
destroyed (to keep up prices) it was seriously suggested that
the only permanent cuie for the disease of over-production
was a technological holiday; not only should no new labour-
saving devices be introduced, but existing machine processes
should be turned back to manual labour in order to absorb
the unemployed. These and other whimsies of like character
were propounded by the e<?onomic pundits, and have been
recorded for our delectation in the witty and poetic fantasias
of Eimar O’DufFy,

I recall this nightmare period for the Information of those

5

PREFACE

too young to remember it themselves, who perhaps started
life when rearmament ordeis had set the wheels turning
again, and because this experience of the break-down of a
culture started Caudwell out on his quest for the means of
regenerating society.

. In the frustrated and bewildered condition that then
afflicted us, the revival of interest in Marxism, with its
massive clarification of the issues, could not be long delayed.
In England, alone among European countries, Marx had
been relegated to the status of an eccentric, and his existence
was not acknowledged at universities. Since his brief
influence in the eighties his work had been kept alive by
small groups of working men (mainly in South Wales and
the Clyde) who clubbed together to buy his weighty tomes
from Kerr of Chicago Now, he was m the very air A
mighty State acknowledged his teachings as the basis of the
radical reconstruction of her economy and culture. Marx-
ism was a light that radiated hope through the glcyam of
Britain’s depressed areas as well as to the impoverished
peasants of the colonies. To stamp out every vestige of
understanding of what Marx had taught became the prime
maxim and declared intention of another powerful State
And having grasped from Marx the clue to the contem-
porary labyrinth, Caudwell found that the other knowledge
he had acquired now fell into due place and proportion.
What had before been an accumulation, ‘a monstrously de-
tailed collection of facts,’ now became capable of organisa-
tion, of vitality. The special progress within each sphere of
knowledge, the ‘closed worlds’ of Caudwell’s phrase, which
is certainly possible even within a culture decaying as a whole,
could now be related to a gener^ movement of society. The
very pains rending our communities were revealed to be not
death agonies but birth pangs.
jCaudwell was not of the type to be content with a few
A* 9

further studies in a dying culture

simple generalisations. Having the Hue, he set out to explore
with its aid deeply into contemporary reality, as that reahty
was being continually extended. And it was clear to him
that he could not do this as the contemplative philosopher,
m secluded study. He became a member of the Communist^
party and played a full part in its organisational and educa-
tional routine. Naturally so, since the working class had
the decisive part to play m liberating society from its in-
tolerable contradictions, but could not bnng this about by
spontaneous revolt against its immediate deprivations.

The pressure of continual crisis, to which we have been
subjected for a generation, induces a tendency to evasion,
which IS very noticeable in the behaviour pattern of to-day,
particularly among the intellectuals. The perspective is
more than the individual can bear to contemplate alone,
and whereas faith is gregarious, the exeicise of reason seems
solitary. That is not how it was with Caudwell, who
through reason came to achieve solidarity. I feel that his
writings will be read to-day with even more understanding
than when they were written, for the dozen years that have
passed have immensely emphasised the world-pattern which
he discerned, so that it is more easily visible than before.
In no case, 1 think, has his position been falsified by events,
for the technological advances necessitated by the late war
have already exacerbated the conflicts and contradictions
within the capitalist system, and this morbid condition finds
its reflection in the violence and sensationalism which
provide an increasing proportion of the subject-matter
represented in literature and the film.

This book contains what were, it seems from internal
evidence, Caudwell’s lateyt writings and they show the
developing originality and maturity of his mind. As a
precaution lest some details of which he wrote in the essay
‘Consciousness’ should have been outmoded by subsequent

10

PREFACE

research, I sent the manuscript to one of our younger
neurologists- who rephed that so far from this being the
case, ‘Caudwell brilhantly anticipates a whole trend which
is now discernable in modern neuro-anatomy. The ex-
perimental material was not available when he was writing
^ that the value of his application of the Marxist method
to the facts as then known is dramatically revealed by the
results of subsequent investigation.’

Another comment on these essays was* ‘CaudweU has
the power of making his conceptual world very densely
peopled, and what distinguishes him, in my opimon, is his
extreme awareness of the different fields of consciousness
and liis abihty to hnk them up.’ The exposition of any
theory tends to be thin, exclusive of all else, but Caudwell’s
writing IS like an exciting discussion for he is always
conscious of an invisible interlocutor, keen witted opponent
of his own thesis. He had not merely grasped Marxism
intellectually or emotionally; it had entered into thejfabric
of his life so that he thought in it, as one can think in a
new language, not merely translate it into one’s own. But
the warmth of emotion, too, glows through the argument
so that It becomes at times true eloquence The essay
on Aesthetics, the most abstruse of abstract subjects,
reminds us that Caudwell had the creative as well as the
ratiocinative gift, and that poetry and art were as essential
to his sense of fitness as bread and air. And m the para-
graph which forms the peroration to this book he has
written his own apologia and sufficient epitaph.

Edgell Rickword

II

NOTE

The quotation from Marx which follows was placed by
Caudwell at the head of one of his essays, but it is so
essentially a statement of his starting point that it comes
naturally as a prelude to the whole book.

Thanks are due to Dr. B. H Kerman for his notes on the
technical aspects of certain statements in the essay ‘Con-
sciousness ’

From Karl Marx.

INTRODUCTION TO THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY

‘In the social production of their means of life, human
beings enter into definite and necessary relations which are
independent of then will* production relations which
correspond to a definite stage in the development of their
productive forces The totahty of these production rela-
tions constitutes the economic structure of society, the real
basis upon which a legal and pohtical superstructure arises,
and to which definite forms of social consciousness corre-
spond

‘The mode of production of the material means of life
determines, m general, the social, political, and intellectual
processes of life. It is not the consciousness of human
beings which determines their existence, it is theii social
existence which determines their consciousness.

‘At a certain stage of their development the material
productive forces of society come into conflict with the
existing production relationships. Or, what is a legal
expression for the same thing, with the property relation-
ships within which they have hitherto moved. From forms
of development of the productive forces those relationships
turn into fetters upon them. A period of social revolution
then begins

‘With the change in the economic foundation the whole
gigantic superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed
In considering such transformations we must always dis-
tinguish between the mateiiai changes ui the economic
conditions of production (changes which can be determined
with the precision of natural science) and the legal, political,
•^jeligious, aesthetic, or philosophic —in short ideological—

^3

forms in which human beings become conscious of this
conflict and fight it out to an issue.

‘Just as little as we can judge an individual by what he
thinks of himself, just so little can we appraise such a revolu-
tionary epoch in accordance with its own consciousness of
itself. On the contrary, we have to explain the conscious-
ness as the outcome of the contradictions of material lifef
of the conflict existing between social productive forces
and production relationships.

‘No social order is destroyed until all the productive
forces for which it gives scope have been developed, new
and higher production relations cannot appear until the
material conditions for their existence have ripened within
the womb of the old social order. Therefore mankind in
general never sets itself problems it cannot solve: since,
looked at more closely, we always find that the problem
arises only when the material conditions for its solution
exist, or at least, arc already m process of formation.

‘Wc, can in broad outline designate the Asiatic, the
Classical, the Feudal, and the modern Bourgeois forms of
production as progressive epochs m the economic formation
of society.

The bourgeois production relations arc the final anta-
gonistic form in the development of social production —
antagonistic, not in the sense of an antagonism between
individuals, but one inherent in the life conditions and social
circumstances of the individuals, at the time when the
productive forces developing m the womb of bourgeois
society arc creating the material conditions for the solution
of that antagonism.

‘This social formation, therefore, constitutes the closing
chapter of the prehistoric sj^age of human society.’

I

THE BREATH OF DISCONTENT

A Study in Bourgeois Religion

I N the study of comparative religion, bourgeois scholar-
ship has from time to time attempted to draw a distinction
between magic and rehgion. The original distinction was
theological; it took a subtler form when magic came to be
regarded as the primitive parent of science, of the behef m
the universal reign of causality. But lacking a definition of
either magic or religion that was really analytical, bourgeois
culture has never been able to produce a science of com-
parative religion which would be both explanat<jry and
inclusive, it has always at some stage or other in the study
revealed its own unscientific content.

Various psychological explanations of the evolution of
religion have been put forward, of which Freud’s Totem
and Tabu is representative, m which well-known psycho-
analytical mechanisms are called upon to explain the
development of religion. But if man’s psyche is genetically
unchanging, the story of religion cannot be explained in
terms of the individual psyche, for a most important
characteristic of religion is just its wide variation, a variation
out of all proportion to the trifling genetic variation of men
in historic times. The study of religion, in any scientific
sense, must therefore be the sti^dy of those causes, independ-
ent of any individual psyche^ which produce in the individual
psyche the religious beliefs and attitudes that we know from
history.

15

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

Attempts have been made to explain the development of
different religions beliefs from animism to Christianity, as
the result of an evolutionary process m the course of which
religion passes through a senes of stages. Such a notion is
only evolutionary m the abstract, for it deals with the
evolution, not of objective religion but of the idea of religioirf
Religion exists as a sum of human beliefs and actions, of
beliefs held by real individuals acting in a real society.'^Its
evolution can therefore only be considered as part of the
evolution of real men m real society. This so-called evol-
utionary school first abstracts religious beliefs from the men
who hold and act them, and then studies their possible
development. This is a logical, not a real, evolution. Since
the material threads making the visual pattern — man’s real
active existence producing religious beliefs— have been cut,
the submerged interconnection which would explain the
pattern is no longer accessible.

Of a^l the bourgeois schools the most realistic in its
approach is the Tunctional’ school of whose theory Malin-
owski and his pupil Audrey Richards are leading exponents.
This school deals with the religious beliefs of primitives only
as they evidence themselves in primitive life, not merely as
abstract ‘beliefs’ but in action, as part of the warp and woof
of daily social transactions.

But it is part of the doom of bourgeois culture that it can
only achieve such correct approaches in closed worlds, m a
limited sector. Although the functional method is formally
correct, it gets applied only to a limited sphere— the study
of certain primitive peoples — and the obscrvcis continually
show the basic confusion of their views on the relations of
men, nature and society. To Ije a thorough-going functional-
ist as regards Melanesian or Bantu society, would be to be a
Marxist and a dialectical materialist

The view of human society taken by this school is not

x6

THE BREATH OF DISCONTENT

really functional, for it does not include, as functions of
society, the ‘civilised’ equipment the observers themselves
bring to their survey of piimitive society. Thus even their
piimitive society is never more than a collection of indiv-
iduals, for there is no real attempt to discern m the collection
oT individuals those relations which make it a society and
aie the seat of change and development. Society for thent is
static and non-historic, as if it were tne result of a crystalla-
tion and not of an evolutionary movement.

Bourgeois culture has, however, not been content with
three different ways of explaimng the evolution of religion
There is also the environmental explanation, m which
religious behefs are the projection of natural phenomena
(sun and ram and sky myths), the individualistic explanation,
in which cunning priests, kings, and chiefs seize hold of
man’s ‘natural’ belief m magic to impose their rule and a
settled cosmogony on their fellows; and the idealistic
explanation, in which religion is due to the birth or evc^ution
of the Ideas of Spirit, Goodness, Awe, and so on
Marx, however, developing m his revolutionary activity
Feuerbach’s and Morgan’s pioneer work, had shown nearly
100 years ago the correct path to follow — not as a new ‘fad’
derived from a limited sphere (the psycho-analytical,
evolutionary, or functional approaches) but as part of a
consistent world-view, the arrival at which meant that one
had ceased to be bourgeois.

(i) ‘Religion is a fantastic reality ’ *

Fantastic, because the statements it makes about existents
are incorrect, because the ideas of outer reality incorporated
in it do not correspond with outer" reality. Real, because

•

* The sentences on which Caudwell comments in the next few pa^es
aie quoted from a famous passage in Introduction to a Oitique

of HegeVs Philosophy of Law, given in full at the end of this essay,
page 75 (Ed.)

77

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

these ideas are causally linked with material reality, and are
not only determined but also determine, in their turn
exerting a causal influence on their matrix. Thus by
acknowledging that religious ideas are not spontaneous but
form part of active reality, Marxism is able to analyse more
deeply the real causes which produced them. The analysrs
of religion becomes also an analysis of society.

(ii) 'Religion is consciousness of self and the self-feeling
of a man who has not yet found himself or has lost himself
again."

The animals are not religious, and religion thus becomes
a badge of man, not as mere animal but as distinct from
animals, and man distinct from animals is man m association
as a functioning group, a group engaged in economic
production Religion is seen to be, like the consciousness
of which it IS a part, an economic product. Because it is
conscious It IS ‘higher’ than the blind unconscious know-
ledge fOf reality shown by the animal in its actions, the
animal whose ‘notions’ of causality exist implicitly as mere
conditioned or unconditioned reflexes. Yet religion is a
distorted knowledge of reality. It is a consciousness of self
winch IS lawless and unattached — which has not yet found
itself or has lost itself. Such a man is conscious of himself,
but projects this consciousness outside himself, unaware as
yet of his own necessities or of the universe of causality in
which his existence is grounded.

(iii) ‘Man is not an abstract being existing outside the
world. Man — that is the world of men, the State,
society.’

This consciousness is not the consciousness of an abstract
average man. It is the sell^feeling of a man in the world of
men, living in active social relations with other men, and
forming a distinctive society. It is the self-feelmg of a
particular individual in a particular society at a particular

i8

THE BREATH OF DISCONTENT

time, and hence the study of lehgion is inseparable from the
study of society.

^ (iv) This state, this society, produces religion — an
^^Averted consciousness of the world — because the world is v--
itself an inverted world.’

The religious distortion of consciousness is produced by
the structure of the society in which it is generated. It is
the outcome of an illusion, a flaw, an infection, m that
society. Thus the criticism of religion is also the criticism
of the society that produced it, and this does not mean a
criticism of that society in the abstract but of its concrete
reality, a criticism of all the social relations engendered by
its level of economic production.

(v) The struggle against rehgion is therefore, indirectly,
the struggle against that world whose spiritual "^6nla is
religion.’

Since the criticism of religion becomes, to Marxism, the
criticism of the concrete social relations which produced it,
the struggle against its errors and its distortions can never
be a struggle against religion as such — a kind of armchair
atheism — because such a struggle is not a real one — it is
ideal truth fighting ideal religion and both, when abstracted
from action, are unreal The very criticism of religion, as
soon as it becomes criticism of concrete religion, becomes
criticism of the social relations that engendered it, and when
this criticism emerges creatively as a struggle, it will not be
an ideal struggle against religious ideas but a concrete
struggle against real social relations. There is no absolute
truth to set against fantastic lies, but fantastic reality whose
fantastic content is exposed in real living.

(vi) ‘Religious misery is at c«ice the expression of real
misery and a protest against that real misery. Religion is
the sigh of the hard-pressed creature ; the heart of a
heartless world ... It is the opium of the people.’

^9

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

But what we have previously said does not mean that the
struggle against religion is merely the struggle against the
non-rcligious social relations that produced it, and that
religion IS exempted from the field of battle. The struggle is
against the real, concietc, social relations which produce
these beliefs, and some of these relations are religious
relations. The whole of concrete society is the domain of
Marxism, and religion is included m concrete society now.
The religious beliefs, and those social forms that are religious,
are part of the existing superstructure of society. Active
ciiticism of that society involves the transformation of its
social relations, and therefore encounters the resistance of all
those men for whom the superstructure is the expression
of their special status and privilege in society. This resistance
makes use of all the forms of the existing superstructure,
including the religious forms. Religious beliefs are part of
the form in which ‘men become conscious of the struggle
and fi^ht it out to an issue.’

Yet religion is ‘at once the expression of real misery and
a protest against that real misery.’ It pictures an inverted
world which, just because it is inverted, will also be a
ciiticism of the ical world. A religion expressive of the
social relations of a virile and active age may, as those
relations emerge moie and more clearly as the bulwark of
an exploiting class now giown parasitic, finally find some of
its content m antagonism to that exploiting class. Conversely
the religion which embodies the protest of an exploited
class may, as that class becomes revolutionary and creative,
itself grow vital and insurgent. Religion, because it is the
opium of the people and not the pride of the exploiting class,
may at some stage give ns^ to a revolutionary religion, the

weapon of the people.

*

Is magic then a ‘human weakness’ and religion a specific

THE BREATH OF DISCONTENT

social product, its form and role only varying according to
the society in which it is found‘d Marx was able to answer
these questions m the course of his sociological analysis —

Magic IS the product of a primitive society. (Man’s self-
feeling before he has found himself). Religion is the
product of a class society. (Man’s self-feeling when he has
lost himself). Dialectical materialism is the product of a
classless society. (Man’s self-feeling when he has found
himself again)

‘The primitive man may recognise the sensations he
experiences without an adequate knowledge of their causes
Malinowski states that the Trobnand Islanders enjoy the
act of eating without any knowledge of the physiological
function of nutrition, just as they enjoy sexual pleasure
without being aware of the physiological nature of paternity.
This was not so with the natives among whom I worked,
but I noticed that the sensations connected with the aliment-
ary or sexual functions were reckoned on a par with what
we should describe as emotional conditions — such anger
or sorrow. It must be remembered heie that visceral
sensations actually aie produced through the action of the
involuntary nervous system under the strain of strong
emotions such as fear or rage The savage recognises that
eating, sexual satisfaction, pregnancy, as well as a number
of emotions, may all be responsible for physiological sensa-
tions which are, in many respects, similar. What wonder
that he concludes sometimes that their cause is similar‘s
‘When 1 drink bcei I feel hot inside, as 1 do when I am
angry,’ a Muhemba said to me, and a man who has just
had sexual intercouse is also described as ‘hot ’ Radcliffe-
Brown points out that the word kmiil is used by the
Andaman Islander to describe heat, the condition of a man
after eating and also after slaying an enemy. It is well
known, too, that among some grimitive tribes pregnancy is
supposed to be a result of eating some special food recog-
nised by the first attack of sickness that the woman
experiences. The Malayan speaks of the hantti or the spirit
of the forest, together with the hmitu that makes people

21

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

(

gamble, smoke opium, dispute, or*' those that produce
stomach-ache or headache, as though all these could be
traced to a similar cause. In fact, as Mr. Smith sums up
the situation among the Ba-ila* The parts they assign to
the organs in the economy of the body are psychical rather
than physiological, i.e. they regard them more as the seats
of emotion than of vital processes.’^ ^

Are animals ignorant of causality‘s In so far as they are
able to respond actively and correctly to stimuli (leaping on
a moving object, turning towards a sound) they prove their
knowledge of causality They show a conditioned reflex,
m which the conditioning represents a certain knowledge
of causality acquired from experience. But it is unconscious
knowledge.

With the evolution of primitive man self-consciousness
emerges. It emerges as an affect, as a feeling which is not
merely the glow of action but something which can be
recalled, can become the object of perception, and can be
externalised. It can be described.

-/But it is the self-feeling of a man who has yet not found
himself. The affect awakened by the stimulus appears to
lead a violent, solitary life of its own. It is common to a
range of actions and is yet distinguishable from them. On
the one hand it is separate, an ego, a stable pov^er; on the
other hand it interpenetrates reality, attaching itself to a
variety of active, interesting movements in outer reality.
And because it attaches to reality, it begins to take on itself
some of the attributes and interest of outer reality. The fear
becomes the thing feared; the desire, the thing desired: the
feeling of domination the actual domination of reality.
The affect is plastic and fluid as reality is not. It is movable,
recallable, shareable, it is a substitute for reality. It is the
self-feeling of the man who Has not found himself, because

* Audiey I. Richards Hunger and Work in a Savage Tribe, 1932

22

THE BRjEATH OF DISCONTENT

he has not yet come lo regard himself as part of reality, in
causal unity with it. How could he do so, when the first
stage of consciousness was the separation of himself from
reality — the discrimination of subject from object as a
struggle, as an antagonism of self against not-self?

•Consciousness emerges then as a ‘lost,’ bewildered affect,
apparently full of illusion and fluidity. It is precisely this
fluidity which gives it its value and ultimately its justification
as the vehicle of higher truths.

The affect, which emerges m the individual as a common
reaction to a variety of experiences, becomes the gesture
and finally the word which, because it is external and
similar, becomes for the group a social name crystalhsing
the common adventures of the group m the world of reahty.
Because the affect involves or is rooted in a similar behaviour
It becomes the means, via the word, of orgamsmg social
behaviour in reference to the varying phenomena of the
outside world Each enriches the other, and language and
consciousness grow as a result of their interaction with a
continually elaborating universe.

It IS this interaction which is social and tribal. Nutrition
and shelter and protection from wild beasts involve a senes
of elaborate actions performed in unison and by no means
instinctive — in short, economic production. Such elaborate
activities can only be co-ordinated by an elaboration of
affect and word organisations which thus contain within
their interstices a social view of outer reality and a community
of emotionally tinged ideas. Thus any picture of the indiv-
idual consciousness at the start detaching itself as a simple
ego from all reality, and acquiring its own presentations and
organising them, is false; for C(»nsciousness emerges as the
concomitant of economic production, as part and parcel
of man’s interpenetration with outer reality. That inter-
penetration generates consciousness, which is therefore full

23

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

of the impress of both. The formation of consciousness is
an active process, now and historically, but because the
activity IS social and secured by a division of labour, this
is not obvious to introspection.

What then is the part that magic plays in this active
interpenetration'^ It is seen everywhere to be the activity
of primitive or atavistic man who, having become conscious
of himself, attempts to find himself by projecting his self-
feehng into outer reahty, in the form of spirits, (animism),
forces, demons, hantu, djmns, nymphs, genu, powers, mana,
ghosts, devils. And he projects, not only the affects but the
active organisation of them, so that it seems possible to
control reahty by those movements which have accompanied
such affects in the past. Rain-makmg, harvest, the multi-
plication of food-animals and the like, is seemed by imitat-
ing the noise of the ram, the actions of sowing or reaping
the harvest, and the gait or appearance of the animals.

By ihus projecting his self-feeling into outer reahty, man
also feels bis way into it. True, he makes the environmental
human, arbitrary, emotional. But as a result he also makes
himself environmental He comes from the transaction
enriched with a knowledge of reahty.

He makes as it were a series of magic propositions about
reality, a chain of wish-fulfilments. In acting according to
these, he imperceptibly finds imposed on them, by inter-
action with reality, a real structure, a determined pattern.
As a result of experience, his prayers for rain are made at
the beginning of the rainy season, his fertility rites are
performed in spring. He prays to the sun to rise at dawn,
and does not ask it to rise immediately after it has set. The
inhabitants of desert land^ do not pray for ram. Thus all
his self-feehng, projected into outer reahty, is organised by it,
and what were at first all-powerful emotions, apparently
dominating reahty, became words emotionally charged,

24

THE BI^EATH OF DISCONTENT

and yet organised and ‘influenced’ by reality, and, finally
those become symbols (mathematics) winch are like a
transparent diess conforming to the shape of outer reahty.
All this has been achieved by his active interpenetration
with reality (Newtonian ‘forces’ of gravity still retain a
colouring of magic, but already the medium is almost
colourless.)

In doing so man has also become conscious of ‘himself’
He sees his body as a part of the environment; as subject to
the same laws. He sees parts of his body, no longer as seats
of emotions, but as seats of physiological functions. He
sees himself as part of the determmed unity of reahty. He
becomes not merely conscious as a self, but conscious of
himself. He, the subject, becomes to himself an object.

He sees this determined unity as a changing unity of
opposites, and himself as an active opposite, realising his
aiTects, not blindly and unknowingly but according to the
necessities of the Universe. He has become conscious of
necessity, and therefore of all reality. ^

The fluidity of the affects remains The affects are attached
to ideas, and his ideas therefore remain fluid, but he does
not now suppose that m organising his ideas according to
his affective drives he is altering reality. He is only altering
himself. That is to say he has ceased to create mythologies,
creeds, schemes of salvation and theologies, and become an
artist, aware that his story, picture, or sound-group is not
a reflex of actual reality (as the priests maintain) but an art
work. Or, if the ideas rather than the affects are his main
interest in this shuffling, he knows he is not altering reality,
but experimenting with possible changes as a scientist and
putting forward hypotheses. ♦

Man, then, has completely found himself. This is not
the end only ol man’s prehistoric stage This inaugurates
tlic most eventful age of man It is precisely art and science

^5

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYMG CULTURE

that are more fluid and evolutionary than magic and religion.
When magic and religion end, therefore, the prehistoric
stage of man’s evolution ends, and he has at last completely
found himself. He has become conscious, not only of
outer reality but of himself, as part with it of the one
active process.

^ ^ m

And then, too, he has necessarily become conscious of
society. We have so far stated the interpenetration in terms
of one average man and nature, but this interpenetration
is only the outcome of the increase in complexity of society,
and thus when man is finally in a position to become con-
scious of the complete, active, subject-object relation, a whole
fabric of social being has been built up, a complex and rich
organism, of which he must now become conscious in order
to achieve the final integration.

It IS just because the interpenetration is the result of a
social --economic process, handling real matter, real natuic
and real men, that it is not a simple ideal movement, but
slowly and painfully developed. It is because consciousness
IS the pioduct of social life that magic and religion have the
complex elaborate history they do have. It is because of
the laws of social relations, of which man is until the end
unconscious, that man seems to find himself and lose him-
self again and again. This is because at the best he only finds
himself as he is not, in the way he finds himself in Aristotle,
Plato, Lucretius, Plotinus, Ockham, Aquinas, Hobbes,
Helvctius, Kant, and Hegel; he finds himself as an individual
in civil society. He is not this. This conception shuts off
from his self-knowledge huge areas of himself, and drives
him to and fro from one contradiction to another. He finds
himself fully and finally only as more than an individual
in civil society, as an individual because of civil society, as
a node in the social plexus.

2d

THE B]|EATH OF DISCONTENT

Sub-man must have been formed into society and human-
ity as the result of a process which forced on him economic
production. By economic production we mean an active
interpenetration of organism with nature that is not innate,
IS not genetically inherited, but is transmitted by external
means, and yet is not environmental in the biological sense.
It IS cultural.

It IS therefore almost a tautology to say that economic
production is what makes man man, for any real definition
of it at once delimits as a distinct sphere all the
human qualities, and at the same time exhibits those
qualities as social, as the result of man being in
economic production associated man. Speech, ideas,
reason, art, consciousness, writing tools, truth, morahty,
law, ethics and ideals — all these are seen to emerge as
social and not individual properties. Though present
m the individual they arc generated as a social process and
seem external. %

The attempt to control nature in a new way is therefore
forced on man by nature, and given m the very form of the
attempt is society — the non-genetical inheritance of an
active interpenetration of man and nature. This proves
itself a richer and moie powerful method than the biological
interpenetration. The struggle becomes more acute; the
war between man and nature is waged on more and more
fronts; and it is precisely this undying hostility, this furious
antagonism, which produces a greater humanisation of
the environment by man and a gieatcr environmcntalisation
of man by nature

Having gatheied itself apart from nature as something
separate and antagonistic, nfan’s self-feeling or con-
sciousness IS simultaneously projected on to nature. This
Itself IS the reflex of man's greater separation from nature by
economic production and the increasing humanisation of

27

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DY|NG CULTURE

natwe (huts, tilled land, tamed anirrfals) which that mtef-
penetration produces.

Therefore in the world of magic, it seems as if man’s self-
feehng was an active creative force, and that the emotions
he felt stir within him were flooding the world of reality
They seem to possess him (for he has not yet found himself)
and nature, (for he is m active relation with nature) and to
be sources of movement and power, moulding the world of
phenomena to their shape. The world therefore becomes
interpreted in terms of these affects, but since affects cannot
be bodied forth socially and interpretation is a social action,
these affects become interpreted m terms of the stock of
ideas socially available, drawn from the social activity of
the community, and in terms of the actions and behaviour
of men in society. This very interpretation changes them,
and we have therefore a mythology in which ordinary terms,
the description of ordinary activities, and ordinary men,
women, and animals become large, sacred, rigid, hieratic,
awesome and hybrid. We have a series of actions which
become formalised, stereotyped, emotional and abstract—
the ritual dances, ceremonies and initiations. This body of
magic ideas and behaviour acts and reacts upon profane
ideas and behaviour but m a primitive community never
becomes isolated from them Most activities and ideas have
a magical element, most magical activities have a social
function.

Now because such a magic is the by-product of the social
relations engendered by economic production, it advances
and develops equally with production at the primitive level
of society. Economic production is realising magic’s
promises. In magic the primitive’s desires become detached
as beneficent or evil spirits with power to change and mould
reality to their will. This is precisely what economic pro-
duction does — it humanises the environment. Man’s desire

s8

THE BREATH OF DISCONTENT

for plenty, externali^d as the god plenty, does through
economic production make the wilderness blossom and
hunting prosper.

Magic presupposes a vast power not actually realised by
primitive economic production. Admittedly, but economic
production at the bourgeois level will give man powers
undreamed of by the primitives, and then, precisely because
the intemperate desires of magic are at last ‘reahsed’, made
real (and changed in thus becoming concrete), magic
itself will disappear, having been sucked into reality. Until
then magic, though generated by economic production, is
in antagonism to it, and this antagonism, by reaching always
beyond man’s powers now, drives him on in hope and con-
fidence to new levels of production.

This process also acts as a kind of channel for magic, and
gives it its characteristic shape. It produces a distinction
between ‘black’ and ‘white’ magic. ‘White’ magic is social
magic, it IS magic rooted m economic production.^ It is
magic which does not, for example, demand manna m the
desert, or sit back and ask the gods to reap and sow the
fields or Robin Goodfellow to make the butter. It is magic
which ‘asks the blessing of the gods’, or ‘brings mana,’
force, magic power upon all the social activities concerned
in economic production It asks this power and this blessing
upon the arduous labour of the harvest, the hopeful spring
sowing, the making of canoes and of huts, the driving of
animals, the various crises associated with the development
of such economic units as the family, the class, or the clan —
marriage, birth, initiation and death. This magic is not a
substitute for such economic production It does not ask
the gods to ripen the grams at o^ce, or demand of magic m
this world immortal life. It is a relish to economic pro-
duction. It asks the gods to put heart and luck into the
labour. By holding out the divine certainty of harvest, or

29

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYJ^G CULTURE

the promise of children, or the magic fenforcement of game,
it gives man courage and heart for the lengthy labours
required before his satisfaction. It does this by the dance,
the chant, the fable and myth, the feast in common.

Since the gods and the forces which man has projected by
magic into nature are mere embodiments and reflections -of
his own self-feehng, and since the purpose of magic cere-
monies IS simply to awaken such emotions in his heart, there
is a reality in magic. The gods, which were originally
personal emotions projected into nature m social clothes,
become in magic ceremonies stripped of their clothes, and
return again into the heart as bare emotions, but now
changed by their intervening hfe. They are taken out of
the social cold storage of mythology. The god comes again
into the worshipper, the worshipper is said to become the
god, as in Dionysian rites — and truly, for the god was never
more than the social crystallisation of the affects of a number
of worshippers, which now leturn into them simultaneously.

Though magic is a reality, it is a fantastic reality. Affects
and outer reality are blended, and confusingly blended. One
distorts the other, man has not yet learned to distinguish
them in science and art. Yet the very interpenetration which
begets their distortion also ensures at this stage their mutual
correction. Magic does not replace economic production*
It is a special offshoot of it, and therefore is a distorted
reflection of it. But it is a conscious, cultural reflection,
portable, easily inherited and easily modified. These
conveniences outweigh the distortions. Because magic, by
reason of its association with economic production, contains
m Its mythology and ritual the correct operations for sowing
and reaping or hunting, (Kystallises the family and tribal
social relations, is a compendious calendar and tribal guide,
and can be handed on and shared socially, it is an invaluable
ally to economic production. It is a special social conscious-

30

THE BRj^ATH OF DISCONTENT

ness of economic production, of the functioning of the tribe
in relation to nature.

It IS thus parent of science. In proportion as economic
production develops and becomes a division of labour,
magic splits up and soon ceases to reflect man’s direct
relation to nature. It ceases to be an almanac and storehouse
of the more abstract and generahsed economic experiences.
It becomes on the one hand art, in which all its affective
organisation crystalhses, and on the other hand science, in
which all its cognitive orgamsation is marshalled. Thus with
the development of art and science magic as an important
vital element in economic production disappears, because
the very development of economic production which it has
helped to bring about has made it unnecessary. Man has
found himself. He has separated himself from the environ-
ment again, in art and science, not absolutely but as part
of a new and more active interpenetration. Magic now only
survives, not as the proud flower of social life, mother^of all
social power and status, but as something hngermg on in
interstices and crevices.

Even while the development of science and art reveals
more truly the precise relation between man and nature,
between man’s self-feelmg and nature’s necessity, a relation
which magic only imperfectly expressed, the division of
labour in economic production had provided a development
in magic. The two developments overlapped. Magic dis-
appeared, became outcast and suspect, became increasingly
replaced by science and art, and at the same time magic
re-appeared in a new and more powerful form. It became
religion.

# * ^ *

In fact of course religion was always latent in magic.
We call It religion only when it shows an organisation, a
coherence, a tough, visible structure. This orgamsation,

31

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DY^NG CULTURE

coherence and structure are themselves only possible as the
result of the development of economic production, through
the division of labour, to a level where society becomes
complex and highly organised. The development of classes
m society makes magic into religion, and gives religion a
characteristic form reflecting the class structure in turn,, as
the form of a specific level of economic production. Even
at the earliest level of economic production, religion is
visible in men’s religious attitude towards the dead. The
dead and the not-dead are the two great divisions of primi-
tive society which seem almost to stand to each other m the
relation of exploited to exploiting classes. The living owe
their productive level to the capital, the instruments of
production, the instruction, the wisdom, and the trans-
mitted culture of the dead who therefore continue to live
m the interstices of the society they have departed from m
body. This half-hfe of the dead, constantly recalled to the
living by their instructions, their leavings and their
social formulations, is the other-world survival of the dead
in all primitive societies which, as the researches of anthro-
pologists increasingly show, is probably the most important
element in primitive rehgious beliefs This immortality of
the dead is a fantastic reality. The dead really live on
socially in the inherited culture of society, but to the
primitive they live fantastically, clothed in the affective and
concrete images of his dreams m another, ghostly world.

Just as magic expressed man’s confused perception of the
relation of man’s self-feeling to nature’s necessities, and
disappears when man finds himself in a true relation to
nature m science and art, so religion expresses man’s
confused perception of tljp relation of man’s self-feehng to
society’s necessities, and disappears when man completely
finds himself in society Until then, religion seems separate
from magic, and seems to tower above science and art, for

5 ^

THE BREATH OF DISCONTENT

science and art are stiU distorted and confused by the con-
fusion of man’s self-feelmg, and have not yet realised them-
selves in society. Rehgion expresses — and therefore defends
— a class-confused society, a society whose view of itself
IS only a fantastic reality because its economic production
stiH functions within the limits imposed by a ruling class.
The struggle against religion, unlike the struggle against
magic, is therefore a struggle against class. The struggle
of one rehgion against another is the struggle of one class
against another, and the struggle against all rehgion can
only be reahsed as the struggle for a classless society. Only
when conditions are ripe for the creation of such a society,
therefore, can the struggle against religion be the important
turning-point of ideological activity.

Just as magic is a confused perception of man’s relation
to reality, but, in spite of its confusion, proves more valu-
able and more powerful than the unconsciousness of beasts,
because it is a conscious perception and therefore a social
perception, so rehgion, although a confused perception of
man’s relation to society, is more valuable than no percep-
tion of social relations at all. Indeed it is essential to the
early development of ‘civilised’ society. As long as economic
production remains below the point at which classes can
vanish, so long the evolution of religion merely expresses
the struggle between different forms of class societies. All
those social relations m which production relations emerge
to consciousness disguised and veiled, are social relations
which inevitably include religion.

In primitive societies, where division of labour is hardly
practised, social relations have not developed such com-
plexity that a bewildering superstructure is interposed
between man and the basis of his life, his struggle with
nature. Man finds himself m association with others directly
confronted by nature. In this fight magic is the heartener,

B 33

FURTHER STUDIES IN A D^ING CULTURE

the confused symbol of man’s powers, the affect broken
loose and humamsing the environment. In so far as it is
secreted by this struggle and regularised by participation in
economic production, magic is also to the tribe the textbook
manual and educator m the technique of association for
economic production. It thus is reality, although a fantastic
reahty. Archaeology finds all men’s first formulations of
causality — the calendar, cosmogony, and physiology — and
of afiective reahties — art, dance, tragedy — and of social
relations — the family, the class, the tribe — emerge first in a
magical dress.

Magic can also be used independently of man associated
in economic production. These magical affects, made
detached and plastic by the rituals of the tribe, can be used
by the individual against other individuals The word, which
IS a social creation and derives its power as a tool from its
social role, can be harnessed in private spells and chants to
private ends — against personal enemies or for personal
goods.

Now it is not possible for such magic to add to the tribe’s
knowledge because it is not secreted m the process of
economic production and therefore is not pressed against the
shape of reality. It is not a science in embyro. It cannot be
tested out in practice by society, and so rectified. It is
private, whispered, individualistic. It is not deeply inter-
twined with outer reahty, hke pubhc magic, by partaking
of economic production. It is not transmitted as a body of
experience for tribal use. It is therefore a degeneration —
the use of tribal capital for personal aims. Society made
magic, for it made the common word and gesture which
seem to possess a pow^ beyond the individual. It does
possess a power beyond the individual, it possesses the
power of associated men, which is composed of and yet
external to individuals, which is not innate but leads a

34

THE BRIATH OF DISCONTENT

Strange life of its own ^nd is fitly symbolised m the form of
ghosts and forces. This social power the wizard uses for
individual ends. Black magic or witchcraft as opposed to
white magic or ritual is therefore rightly condemned as
anti-social, disruptive and dangerous. It is wicked, just as
white magic is holy — Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live ’
Because it is unconventional and does not use socially
recognised forms embodying the structure of society as its
channel, it is opposed to white magic and religion. Thus all
innovators in rehgion will be met by rehgion with the cry
of ‘witches,’ ‘heretics,’ ‘wicked men,’ because they negate
the social norms of the time. All such negation seems wicked.
The question is whether they are rebels and revolutionaries
expressing new productive forces strugghng for release or
merely maladapted individuals making anti-social sorties.
If they are harbingers of a successful revolution, they in
their turn will become holy.

Magic remains at the level of magic only m a primitive
society In such a society, economic production knows no
division of labour except that arising from genotypical as
distinct from imposed classes. Such classes are formed by
the sexes, which in turn may be divided into children,
initiated, adolescents, bachelors, married, and aged. Such
a primitive society is best seen m Austraha, but is common to
all tribes still at the food-gathenng stage of culture.

When economic production passes beyond food-gathering
to settled agriculture, a division of labour takes place which
involves in each unit a man who acts as director of labours,
keeper of the calendar, custodian of the social capital in the
form of seeds, implements, or garnered fruits. This is the
village headman, who becomes the chief, and, as agricul-
ture develops to the stage where it requires perhaps irri-
gation works, huge granaries, and the creation of roads and
canals he becomes the god-king, endmg as the apex of the

35

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DICING CULTURE

pyramid of subordinate or autonomous directors of opera-
tions — priests, lords, mandarins and the like. When agri-
culture has passed from gardening to gram growing, he
emerges as the Pharaoh of Egypt, the kings of Babylon and
the Mesopotamian city states, the Emperor of China, the
Mikado of Japan. His exact position and his relatioa to
similar exalted personages depend on the development of
economic production, which in turn will depend upon the
topography and chmate of the area, its relation with other
areas, its own past history, and the internal forces produced
by the development of the superstructure.

Such a man derives his magic power not, as Frazer
imagines, from his cunmng in imposing himself as a magic-
ian on his 'naturally’ credulous neighbours but because his
role, forced on him by the division of labour, makes him
m fact custodian of those supra-individual forces which
arise from division of labour and the association of men.
Such division and association does wield powers which are
more than the individual himself can wield m the struggle
against nature. As long as his perception of the origin of
these forces remains confused, the individual feels that they
are external to him and more powerful than him. He therefore
abases himself to these forces. Since these forces are plainly
wielded by the king or chief, they seem concentrated in the
person of the chief or king, who therefore seems awful, holy,
sacred, all-powerful and divine. The precise relation of this
chief to the symbols in which the magical consciousness of
the tribe has bodied forth its social affects, depends on a
chain of historical circumstances, which in no case follow
exactly the same route. The relationship between the chief
and the animal or human personifications of these social
forces, is always close. The chief is the incarnation or son
or favoured instrument of such forces. The god converses
with him or dwells m him.

3 ^

THE BREATH OF DISCONTENT

The family is the economic unit of primitive society: the
medium by which food — ^which does not come on a market
— ^is distributed and by which the inherited capital of the
tribe in the form of technique, language and the memorised
plexus of social relations, is transmitted to the babe. It is
the primary educational unit of the tribe, becoming m-
creasmgly important with the increase m size of the tribe,
which forces the family to take over many clan functions.
Such an increase m size can only take place as the result of
the development of economic production. Thus the god-
king or holy chief comes into being at the same time as the
family unit becomes of increased importance as the mam
economic channel. In the chief’s family his children will
learn the rudiments of his special task and be themselves
therefore specially quahfied to perform it Thus a unique
virtue will seem to inhere in the blood royal* the sacredness
of kingship, derived from direction of the community’s
labour power, wiU seem hereditary. A ruling class wilbhave
completely emerged, whose power and prerogatives,
because of the confused nature of man’s perception of
society and his deficient powers of abstraction, will seem
to be inherent in and arise from the chief’s blood.

The division of labour in agriculture, because of its
eflSciency, develops rapidly It is checked only by territorial
considerations, or by impact with other developed forms
growing from other centres and meeting on a common
boundary. Smaller units will be absorbed. As the organisa-
tion of agriculture grows more complex, so the social
relations arising from it become more elaborate and more
pyramidal. Whole new classes may arise — priests, warriors,
clerks, local lords and chiefs, all apparently depending on
the god-king at the apex. The stabilising element of the
whole is the right of the ruler, expressed as religion, as the
projection on to him of all those ‘loose’ affects, all those

57

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DY^NG CULTURE

symbolised social forces, which stanJ to the individual man
as external, heroic realisations of his own limited desires
and powers, something holy and apart

Thus the tutelary deity or chief god of such an economy
IS closely identified with the god-king, and represents the
power of the tribe, city, or kingdom as an associated group
of individuals — represents everything m the association
which IS more than the mere sum of the powers of separate
individuals. In so far as the economic production of the
society will turn upon sun, wind, rain, and sea he will also
invest himself with the affects which man has projected into
these natural phenomena. These phenomena have become
for him, as they have not for the animal, objects of interest,
because their behaviour affects his sowing and reaping and
building. Such a society tends to be monotheistic in that
the god which expresses the solidarity of the tribe is exalted
against all other gods — as Jehovah against Baal — and is
held^to account for all the successes of this tribe against
others. Such a monotheism may become the medium of a
whole national resurgence, as when the Semitic tribes of
Arabia, a pastoral people, hurled themselves upon the
settled peoples of Europe, to the cry, ‘We are all one people:
join our economy or die.’ (There is no God but Allah.
Acknowledge him, or pay tribute, or be put to the sword.’)
It does not exclude however the accompaniment of the
tribal god by a host of lesser spirits, cherubim, seraphim,
Beelzebub, and other personifications of the forces of nature,
as against personifications of the social unity. Yet man’s
homage to these forces is always more individualistic and
personal. The one compelling homage which to ignore is to
be really wicked, is the hefinage to the tribal god.

This pure monotheism cannot exist in a successful
agricultural society. It can exist, as the example of Islam
shows, in a successful pastoral society, where there is little

3 ^

THE BREATH OF DISCONTENT

division of labour and'all men are equal beneath the chief—
Mohammed, Prophet of God, and his Cahph. Such an
equality cannot exist m a society where the pyramiding of
function involved m a settled agricultural society has been
earned far. There are gradations of sacredness, and the
ruling class is hierarchical. For that very reason Mohamm-
edanism comes as a message of hope to an exploited class,
and this accounts for its early fierce disruptive power. This
necessarily collapsed as soon as a pastoral society, by its
conquests and tribute drawing, became transformed into
just another Asiatic despotism, and m spite of the survival
of the rigid Mohammedan formula with its monotheistic
proclamation of pastoral equality, the Mohammedan
rehgion became for the exploited class filled with godhngs,
beatified disciples, and angels The religion, though degen-
erate, is changed by its previous history. Mohammedanism,
even in process of becoming another oriental despotism,
retains a pastoral flavour of equahty. It is more stable>,.and
at a higher plane than the older rehgions. This in turn
reacts upon its economy, which always remains more virile,
seafaring, merchandising and nomad than a settled agricul-
tural civilisation.

The pure flame of monotheism may of course be kept
alive in an unsuccessful tribe which is not completely
extinguished. Thus the Jews, situated on the mam trade
route of early civihsation and harried and battered on all
sides, were compressed into a proud, prickly, bigoted
society whose difficult economic life is reflected m their
religion. But this very battering toughened them, and made
of Judaism a consciousness which, as events proved, was to
possess great survival value in*- the maelstorm of social
relations of the East.

Monotheism of this kind is incompatible with despotic
Imperialism. When for a brief time the Jewish tribe became

39

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DY5NG CULTURE

Imperialising, and Solomon was eved able to aspire to the
hand of Pharaoh’s daughter, Solomon took to himself
strange gods. The quick collapse of Solomon’s empire
brought about a return to monotheism and the collapse
Itself was attributed to the unauthorised additions of
Solomon.

When an agricultural kingdom imperialises, the unit it
swallows up becomes part of the economy of the kingdom
None the less it retains much of its original structure. For
example a Mesopotamian or Nilotic ‘city-farm’ swallowed
up by a monarchy will retain its local governor, who now
becomes subordinate to the monarchy; and the local deity
who symbohses the forces of the community will pass into
the national pantheon. It will depend on the importance of
the unit swallowed whether the god or goddess will become
incarnate m the tutelary deity of the nation, or merely get a
seat in the pantheon, and whether it remains a god or
beco^mes a ‘hero.’ In any event the local deity will continue
to be a cult at the headquarters of the unit. Such imperialism
should not be confused with the modern Imperialism or
Mohammedan Imperialism, m which two different economies
one temporarily superior to the other, happen to collide.
There is then no fusion of religions for the economies do
not fuse Either the relation is merely one of tribute drawing,
m which case the conquered society keeps its economy and
religion as m most of India to-day; or else one economy
swallows up the other, which therefore adopts (with minor
differences) the religion of the conquering race. This is
seen in that part of India affected by bourgeois culture,
which therefore becomes Westernised and bourgeoisified.
It would be better to caS the Imperialism of Egypt and
China, which resulted in the fusion of the societies involved,
‘expansion’, rather than Imperialism in the tribute-drawing
or bourgeois sense.

40

THE BREATH OF DISCONTENT

Thus a fully developed pantheon, such as that of Egypt,
Babylon, China, or India, represents a kind of telescoping
of the social history of the peoples involved. The vanous
incarnations of the ruling deity, and the other occupants of
the pantheon, represent swallowed social units (such as the
nomes of Egypt) of greater or less importance. Myths, such
as that of Isis and Osins or the Chinese Sky-goddess,
embody a magic account of the society’s economic produc-
tion Other natural forces enter as ‘promoted’ spirits or
ghosts, and the development of warrior and learned classes,
and of all other forms of division of labour, results in gods
presiding over such activities. The tutelary god has a prime
Minister or Vizier, a secretary, a wife. The profane
family is reflected in a holy one. The inverted world of
religion acquires a bewildering complexity, has a long
history of its own, and exerts a reciprocal effect on the
society which engenders it The labours of archaeologists
on the records of Egypt, Babylon, China, India, A^syna,
Persia, and Crete can only partially uncover this history, for
the most living part of religion, its ritual and its active
social being, is lost. Only the bones of the orgamsm remain.
None the less enough remains to make increasingly clear
the accuracy of Marx’s analysis, based on the work of
Morgan and Feuerbach.

- Communities which exist by gardening, instead of
agnculture, and where such gardening is (as still to-day in
Africa) the monopoly of women, will worship a Mighty
Mother, symbolising in female form the productive forces
of the tribe. Since the males of such tribes are generally
war-like, the Mighty Mother will be accompamed by a war-
god, standing to her in the eqikvocal relation of husband
and son.

Because a division of labour continually secures increased
productivity, a civilisation of this character — ^the settled

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYTNG CULTURE

agricultural culture of Egypt, Persia, -China, Mexico, Peru,
India, and Mesopotamia — continues to fuse into increas-
ingly centralised despotisms. The individual in whose
person all the forces of such a society are concentrated, the
god-king, therefore becomes increasingly awful and sacred.
Those individuals who regard all the forces wielded by
society as ahen to them become increasingly humble, for the
discrepancy between their individual powers and the power
wielded by society in the person of the despot has become
enormous Caught up m the elaboration of the economic
process, they are mere passive labouring units — slaves.

This religious alienation of themselves from the forces of
society, this religious ‘humility’, is of course the reflex of a
similar alienation m the realm of right or law. The products
of society seem to an increasing extent to be due, not to
them as individuals but to the forces arising from their
association, which forces as we have seen, arc all concen-
trated m the person of the god-king. The god-king comes
therefore to own all these products, and to his subjects is
granted only as much as will maintain them alive, and even
this IS a gift of the God-king, springing from his beneficence
and mercy, and in no way a right due to them from him.

Meanwhile, round the god-king cluster all the administra-
tive, clerical, priestly and warrior castes who receive a
portion of the sacred effulgence of the monarch, for they
too are custodians of part of the forces of society, and
therefore with a qualified right in its products. Unlike the
lower class — the subjects, slaves, or common people — ^this
class has rights and privileges, and a sacredness which,
while less than the despots, is still enough to separate them
from the rightless. In a highly developed agricultural
economy, there are products over and to spare beyond what
IS needed to maintain ahve the exploited class.

This ofiB-cial class or aristocracy is naturally interested in

42

THE Bi^EATH OF DISCONTENT

the maintenance of*the system, yet their own sacredness
and the fact that the running of all the forces of society is
in their hands, give them a less absolute behef in the official
religion. They have a strong sceptical tendency, and invari-
ably generate a ‘refined’ religion of their own, free from the
‘superstitions’ of the ‘mob’, such as the Confucianism of
China, the ‘esoteric’ teaching of Egypt, and the Brahmamc
‘philosophy’ of India Hence, should the god-king prove
personally obnoxious, they have httle hesitation in replacing
him by a palace-revolution.

There can be only one end to such a class society. There
is an increasing split between the ruling class and the active,
exploited class. The one becomes more and more function-
less, parasitic, and ‘philosophic’, and the other more and
more exploited, miserable, and superstitious. The productive
process falls more and more into the hands of the ‘ignorant
class’, who are pressed still more keenly for tribute, until a
general impoverishment of agriculture and failure of the
national economy begins to take place.

Such a culture soon becomes a hollow shell, which still
keeps up a semblance of vigour, but is m fact slowly decay-
ing. Its decay may last several centuries. The revolt of the
exploited class will be sporadic and disorganised, for the
nature of an economy of this kind is not such as to develop
in the toilers the qualities which will make them in their
turn able to rule. Such a decaying culture may split up into
a number of feudal units, and revitalise itself because, in so
doing, each local chief rallies round him as supporters his
local exploited clan, and to do so improves their lot. The
process will however only be repeated again, and out of local
provinces will rise another Emperor. Or the kingdom may
be exploited by a similar kingdom at a more vigorous stage
of development. Or it may be over-run by pastoral invaders
who with their more equalitarian social relations

43

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

revitalise the economy, only to see the»kingdom perish once
again m the misery of the exploited class as the economy
drops.

This is the history of what Marx called the ‘Asiatic’ form
of culture. It explains the despotisms, decays, disruptions,
and dragging deaths-m-life of the great Empires of Egypt,
Mesopotamia, India, China, and Central and South America.
All such empires are based on a settled agricultural economy
involving irrigation works and the extensive co-ordmation
of agriculture. Their rehgion reflects this development and
the way in which man’s self-feehng which has lost itself is
projected in an inverted world. Inverted — because man’s
abject humihation before the forces of that world is a parody
of his own exaltation by association in society. Yet as a
parody, it is also criticism. Because of his humility, his
exaltation is alienated from him and invested in another.
The powers he creates are assumed by the ruling class,
before which he abases himself. The law of his society,
which includes his self-alienation from the goods he pro-
duces, IS just that distortion of the real facts of social life
which generates the inverted world of religion. Thus we see
what Marx meant when he said that religion is an inverted
consciousness of the world because that world is itself an
inverted world. The exploited class, which is the real source
of the productive power of society, places itself at the
bottom of the pyramid by giving to the parasitic class the
whole of the goods it produces beyond the bare minimum
necessary for existence. The overt social structure is itself
an inversion of the reality behind it. At first the ruling class
is functional, as it becomes more sacred and division of
labour grows it becomes more functionless and parasitic.
Such a world becoming constantly more fully inverted is
just the world which produces a more and more elaborate
religion acting as a counterbalance. Finally, from having

44

THE BkEATH OF DISCONTENT

been a vital factor m economic production, magic, grown
into developed religion, has become the bulwark of a
functionless class and therefore one of the fetters on
economic production.

* ^ ^

Into such an inverted world are necessarily projected all
the distortions caused by the discrepancy between society’s
outward forms and its real content. Such a society feeds
its exploited with products belonging ‘of right’ entirely to
the rulers: therefore the divinities are kind and generous.
The feeding, the very life of the exploited class depends
entirely on a society in which they are alienated from the
means of production therefore their whole existence and
life is dependent on God, and since all good things, all force
and power and knowledge, are resident in society, the misery
can only come from another source, either from ari* anti-
god or devil, or from their selves — from their sinfulness.
Thus sin, which in primitive society is restricted to anti-
social acts — the breaking of taboos or the malconduct of
magical ceremonies — becomes in more developed societies
an almost permanent condition of the populace. The
religious dream life, by a well-known mechanism, becomes
a compensation or reflex of the waking hfe. In proportion
as life becomes more miserable and deprived, one’s dreams
become richer and more full of content. In dreams, man’s
ghost seems to wander and leave the body, and thus it
becomes an article of such religions that m a future life the
ghost, wandering m the other, inverted world, will inherit all
the good things of that world.

Separate, ghostly existence as a concept is a result of
dream. Immortal or long enduring existence as a concept is
the result of the transmission by society of history and names

45

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYIll^G CULTURE

and it is true that m this traditional otlfer-world of society’s,
men’s emanations do enjoy a hfe beyond life This abstract
fact becomes fantastically concrete m religion. At first this
life beyond life is a perquisite of the king or famous men and
so more accurately reflects the social basis of the belief;
but as the economy develops and an exploited class grows,
its urgent misery drives it to a demand for other-worldly
goods. Since these ghostly goods can be granted without
depriving the ruling class of real goods, the common people
finds itself— for what it is worth — in possession of the
fantastic privileges of its betters, to lead a hfe beyond life
in the inverted world of religion. Successive layers of
excavation clearly reveal this process in Egypt, where the
immortality associated with funerary rites, at first a per-
quisite of the god-king, gradually filters down to all classes.
This fantastic realisation which is at once the expression of
real misery and a protest against that real misery, which is
the Swgh of the hard-pressed creature, therefore, like a
neurotic or psychotic compensatory mechanism, acts as a
stabilising factor against the growing misery of the people.
Religion now finally, m the course of this long development,
has become a safety-valve — the opium of the people In the
last stages such a society’s religion has as its most important
content, not a pantheon of power, but salvation, release
from sm (i.e. from temporal misery), eternal life, divine
love and consolation and fatherhood — or motherhood. It
has become the 'souF of a soulless world.

^ ^ ^ ^

But even the god-king’s will is subject to checks. His
prayers for harvest do not always prevail: this cannot be
always interpreted as the sin of his people Floods and
earthquakes and pestilences come. Man, m spite of economic
production, has not completely subdued nature. In other

46

THE BJ^EATH OF DISCONTENT

words the gods whd s3aiibohse the powers of economic
production, are not all-powerful. There is a process which
even they cannot subdue.

This process therefore emerges as Fate, Law, Kismet,
Karma, as a mechanical set process which even gods must
obey. Because man is still projecting his self-feehng into
nature, this force appears as a Will, but because it is dis-
tinguished from the gods it is a disembodied Will or some-
thing woven mechamcally from a thread. This Will is the
residue of magic. It represents magic’s recogmtion — after
It has reached the more thoughtful and stabilised inter-
penetration with reahty involved in an economic production
that IS rehgious — ^that there are things beyond the power of
economic production. This disembodied Will, which sucks
within Itself all those phenomena proved not amenable to
economic production but observed as a result of economic
production, is therefore both the negation and the product
of magic. It IS the recognition, first of an arbitrary^ will,
later (as we shall see) of a Law which even the gods — i.e.,
society — cannot override. It is causahty or determination
in embryo. As society develops, determimsm develops, for
all society’s explorations of reality as a result of economic
production, generate fresh evidence of processes which
cannot be overridden. But just because they cannot be
overridden, they can be predicted. They can be used
Causality or Kismet, becoming science, is once again fused
with the economic production it at first negated. Society,
by becoming conscious of necessity, becomes free of it.

Asiatic culture cannot, however, reach such a full under-
standing. The most refined philosophies of the ruling class
of such a culture (Chinese and todian) can only see reality
as a theatre of wills or projected affects, for the overt forms
of their societies depend on various rights to effect one’s
wiU, to dispose arbitrarily according to one’s individual

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

desire of one’s land and subjects. Th"e real content of the
society IS veiled from them, for such a world is an inverted
world. The power of such a society does not m fact inhere
in their wills but in the actions of the ruled class. Creativity
does not flow from their desires as such, but only m so far
as their desires enter as an active component into the actions
of the exploited class and so into the productive movement
of society.

In so far as their wiUs are opposed to the productive move-
ment of society, they are merely obstructive, sucked of
their real content, illusory and fantastic. To understand
this would be to cease to be a ruhng class, owning the means
of production, and to become specialists, working the means
of production. Hence such societies cannot advance
beyond a philosophy of idealism, in which Will and Mind
are dominant and Ideas have a supra-material, absolute
existence outside the heads of men. Such an idealism is
tawdi^y and limited because it commits the thinker to a
closed, eternal world bound inside the categories of present
theory, instead of presenting an open, timeful world in
which theory is growing and enriching itself in active
penetration of matter. In the same way this society’s idea
of causality, symbolised as Fate, can never escape from an
arbitrariness, an air of magic and subjectivity, because
cause is always seen as cause by a conscious force, or
entity, wluch is simply the ruling class’s affective will pro-
jected into reality as an absolute.

In India, with its streams of invaders and constant move-
ment, such a culture produces the pullulating pantheon
of Hinduism, or achieves, in the Empire of Asoka, the
metaphysical nihilism of Biiddhism, in which society, having
achieved its utmost limit, cannot escape from its social
fetters or the infection of an exploited class, and sees
stretching before it in all its helplessness, the iron wheel of

48

THE BREATH OF DISCONTENT

4

things, from which it would be a blessmg to escape. Man
seems to find himself for a moment m Buddhism, only to
lose himself, for it is the product of a ruling class grown
pessimistic of its office, and seeing blessedness as the cessa-
tion of will. It survives only by becoming a new religion,
full of ‘salvation’ and divine love In China, more shielded
from invasion, the same development produces a static,
rigid pantheon in the sky, with the causahty of the Way
above it, and at its apex the divine son of the Sky-Goddess,
the Emperor, incarnation of the social forces on earth.

China and South and Central America remained units in
isolation. India became a meltmg pot of invading waves.
But Egypt, and to a lesser degree Babylonia and Crete, as
centres of a more stable civihsation gradually exported to
the fringes of the Mediterranean their wheat and settled
agricultural production — all the technique which had made
them elaborate centres of despotism. In the differing
physical conditions of Greece, Asia Minor and Jtaly,
however, this technique never advanced beyond the forma-
tion of city states. By the time these states had developed to
the stage of small kingdoms, based on cities, settled agri-
cultural production had ceased to be the mam productive
force of the societies they represented They became, by
reason of their topographical situation and the natural
development of their fishing activities, real trading centres.
Their smallness as umts, separated by mountains and
straits, encouraged trade — the sea was handy and a general
highway. Shipbuilding and the like they already had from
Egypt. Thus a new society emerged, in which the productive
forces of society were disguised and made complex by the
intervention of trafficking, and mere was a numerous class
which did not owe its position or its power to its specific
place in the agricultural division of labour, but seemed to
snatch its wealth out of the air. Such a society was even

49

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYlf^G CULTURE

further confused by the incursion of pastoral peoples, as
conquering waves, who imposed for a short time an ahen
economy, pantheon and social organisation upon the
peoples they subdued.

Thus an entirely new economic development took place
in which the city, as the trading centre, acquired a hegemony
over agriculture, and the ruling class was at least partly a
trading class. Such states, with their competitive basis,
are necessarily disruptive — ^they are ‘free’ states quarrelhng
always about their pnvileges and freedoms, jealous of the
hberties of their markets, and only reluctantly combimng
in the face of a common danger. It was bourgeoisdom in
embryo, but the basis of all such states still remained
agiicultural, and the slave class created by settled agri-
cultural economy was taken over, as a system, by the ‘free’
pastoral peoples and became the basic relation of agri-
culture and commodity production generally. Hence, in
spitex)f the market for commodities, there was no market
for labour-power — only for slaves. The conditions were
not yet ripe for the development of bourgeois economy.

In such societies the tutelary deity of the city symbolised
the productive forces of society, and production i evolved
round the city with its protective walls, and the domain it
ruled. The god-kmg or hero or mighty mother of the local
economy appears to fuse with the local pantheon of the
incoming pastoral people — ^the father patriarch and his
family. The more equalitarian economy of the pastoral
people results in the gathering round the petty, divine king
of a gerontocracy who ultimately depose him and are them-
selves — in Athens and elsewhere — deposed by the rising
merchant class who form^'a democracy This marks the
apex of Greek development, and in Rome takes the form of
the transfer from the senatorial to the ‘kmghtly’ class. The
very strife between the agricultural and merchant ruling

5 ^

THE BR'EATH OF DISCONTENT

classes is insoluble wiftiin the framework of a slave-owning
society, and ultimately brings about the break-down of
Hellenic economy But before its collapse it has given birth,
in the momentary efflorescence of Athenian, Ionian and
Corinthian prosperity, to the culture whose bold speculation
reflects the scepticism and untraditional cosmopolitanism
of the rising merchant classes. Hellenic philosophy, however,
in spite of Its moments of splendid balance, never escapes
from the limitations of a slave-owning class whose slaves,
interposed as a buffer between themselves and nature,
prevent their philosophy emerging as completely positive
and scientific. In Ionia it is revolutionary: with Plato more
conservative: always it is fresh and critical, but always it is
unable to get beyond a self-feeling which has not found
itself. It remains a religious philosophy, which projects
Will into nature, sees causality as Fate or Divine Law, and
explains reality m terms of human Purposes, Forms or
Ideas existing independently of human brains orr, real
matter.

In its prime able to overturn the despotism of the East
and penetrate into India, Greece becomes, as slave-owning
develops on a merchant basis, the centre of intolerable
antagonisms. It thus falls a victim to the centralised
despotic monarchy. The Empires with their god-kings come
into being again. Merchant towns, such as Alexandria,
remain the centre of scepticism and a critical attitude to
divinity, but the demoralisation of the slaves is reflected in
the universal reign of the various mystery religions, full of
salvation and immortal life. They had existed m the early
agricultural despotisms of Mycenean civilisation (Demeter
and the Eleusinian mysteries>^ but had sunk into the
background with the invasion of the Hellenes These
Hellenes had a full-blooded pastoral economy, m which life,
lived to the full in this world, required only a short, shadow

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYfNG CULTURE

existence in the next. The mystery rehgions emerged
triumphantly again when this Hellenic rejuvenation, so
brief and glorious, in turn produced an enormous exploited
class, demanding m its inverted world the life denied it in
the real world.

While therefore the East continued its old despotisms,
and the Greek god-kmgs flounshed, blown upon by sceptic-
ism only in the cities, Rome was establishing in Italy a
hegemony which no Greek city, with its less favourable
topography, was able to achieve Rome too had an agii-
cultural god-king (Saturn) who was replaced by a pastoral
god-patriarch (Jove). In Rome too, therefore, it may be
supposed that a pastoral people conquered a settled agri-
cultural people, and the resulting fusion begot a king and a
gerontocracy (the senate) which finally deposed the king,
and was itself deposed by a trading class. It is no accident
that Rome on the Tiber was a trading centre, and the emerg-
enceaof her senate and equestrian classes must have been due
to the emergence of a merchant class beneath the veil of
agricultural and pastoral social relations This class rapidly
becomes a predatory and powerful class, its army of
‘citizens’ being far superior to Oriental despotisms or more
decadent Greek cities Its religion, so similar to the Greek,
yet reflects the greater insularity and ‘purity’ of Roman
development, farther removed from Egyptian and Eastern
ideology. Patriarchial relations, rehes of a pastoral people,
affect the ideology of the ruling class and give it a sternness
and absoluteness in its dealings with other peoples that is
regarded as typically Roman.

The spread of Roman influence necessarily involves the
creation of a huge predfatory class, the senatorial and
knightly, whose increasing wealth is the reflection of the in-
creasing exploitation, unknown to those Asiatic despotisms
in which the ruling class at least remains part and parcel of

5 ^

THE BRHSATH OF DISCONTENT

the economy it exploits. The Roman ruhng class is, however,
a trading, absentee class Such a non-functional class, in
winch the forces of society seem to be wielded by men who
take no active interest in the worlds they rule, gives rise to
stoicism, in which the gods are absentee landlords, and the
wojrld shuffles on as well as it can. Such a religion can only
arise in a general demoralisation such as that which over-
took the Roman world in the last years of the Repubhc.
The absentee, predatory class, by their very absenteeism,
had prepared their own downfall, and it was possible first
for Caesar and then Augustus and his successors to rule
through an administrative class of freemen, a new bureau-
cracy whose creation involves the death of the older
exploiters. The Roman Empire takes on more and more
Oriental characteristics, and, as slave-owning economy
develops again on the basis of local and centralised bureau-
cracies, with the trading cities included in the social plexus,
we have the final stage of classical economy. The pivot of
the stage has become the god-king, the Emperor, who rules
his people as the master rules his slaves, and in whom seem
concentrated all the productive forces of society. Beneath
him are grouped an aristocracy who derive their ‘sacredness’
from him and regard him with veiled scepticism. Their own
religion is some or other form of a refined idealistic philos-
ophy, which m a certain gap opened between the gods and
reahty, reflects the complexity of this stage of economy, in
which the god-kmg rules indirectly through various channels
and no longer dwells in the midst of society as in the simpler
Egyptian despotism But to the vast exploited class the
god-kmg and the tutelary deity he represents, is still the
incarnation of the forces of society. Round him clusters
whatever cult or pantheon has been inherited, but his figure
is central and he guarantees the Roman Law, creation of the
new bureaucracy, which secures the smooth functioning of

55

FURTHER SlUDIES IN A DYfNG CULTURE

the productive economy, and at oncfe oppresses them and
keeps them this side of extinction.

Such a society can only repeat the history of past despot-
isms The cleavage between the slave-owners and the slaves,
the vain rebellion of the slaves, brings about an increasing
exploitation of the slave and serf classes, and an increasing
impoverishment of society The structure, because of its
complexity, size, and military efficiency, is not as yet
challengeable by any other power outside

It IS however challenged by an internal power. Christian-
ity appears, a new religion in which the eternal happiness
promised by mystery religions in the next world is to be
realised m this world by the practice of a new form of social
relations — primitive communism. Each chuich is a group
of the faithful holding all material goods m common, in
possession of salvation, and waiting until Christ their King
shall return to earth and lealise the millenium m the uni-
versal reign of primitive communism. Whatever gave this
programme its detailed form, however much it owed to the
Essenes, to the Galilean village economy, to the personality
of Christ, and to the nationalism of Palestine, it was evident-
ly the bodying forth of the aspirations of the exploited class
It IS a religion of revolution.

It is misleading to regard Christianity as simply another
'mystery’ religion (such as Mithraism or the cult of Isis)
which because of some superior attractiveness carried the
day against its rivals. This is to see religion not as a social
reality but as the adventure of an idea. The Isis and Mith-
raistic cults were ordinary products of Asiatic misery and
classical decay, promisin| m the next world salvation and
healing for the miseries of this Christianity was distinct
from religions of this kind because of its tougher, this-
worldly content. The millemum was to come m this world,

54

THE BREATH OF DISCONTENT

the Kingdom of Heaven was to be reahsed here. It was led by
a revolutionary figure — Christ, whose apparently unsuccess-
ful rebellion had according to his disciples really been a
triumph.

For a long time now the Roman Empire had been decaying,
so ^ that the social relations it represented had become a
fetter on the productive powers. The god-Emperor and his
staff had ceased to be functional umts of society and had
become mere tax-gathering and defence organs which were
not even working efficiently as such. The decay of communi-
cations and the loosening of the economic cords that had
held the Empire together, drove the god-king and his staff
wildly about the Empire in an attempt to hold together with
the superstructure of law and administration what was
already falling apart as the result of the increasing de-
composition of agnculture. The Empire was returning
whence it had sprung, as the result of the impoverishment
of the soil by latifundia and the general demoralisatioii of
the exploited class. Local landlords were leaving their
estates wholesale because of the increasing relative burden
of taxation.

This economic devolution was reflected in the growth of
Christianity, particularly in the large towns which as the
bonds slackened were naturally the first to feel the function-
lessness of the god-Emperor’s regime. Christianity was the
equivalent of a nationahst movement, but no nations
existed m the cosmopolitan Roman Empire. The choice was
between the city or local community and the Empire. The
nearest to a nationalist movement was in Jerusalem and it
was precisely in Jerusalem that Christianity arose round the
person of a typical Jewish propiiet, Jesus. The local ex-
ploiting class of Jerusalem, the ‘Scribes and Pharisees,’ had
however come to terms with the conqueror, the relation
somewhat resembling that between the British Government

55

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DY5NG CULTURE

and the de Valera Government in Ireland. Although their
interests are opposed, both are rooted in the same class
society and both therefore are opposed to a Workers’
Republic of the type now being fought for there.^ Jesus
evidently also had in mind a ‘People’s Republic,’ in which
goods would be shared m common, there would be neither
master nor man, and exploitation would cease. He believed
it however to be possible within the framework of the exist-
ing State (‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’).
In other words, he did not regard it as necessary that the
seizure of power should take place as a prehminary to the
inauguration of the People’s Commune or Kingdom of
Heaven on Earth, the idea of which — so poetically and
ideahstically unfolded — secured him his tremendous support
among the working class of Palestine who listened to his
denunciations of the rich

This reformist instead of revolutionary approach was
justrWhat secured the defeat of Christianity. Such demonstra-
tions as that of the entry into Jerusalem showed the wide
measure of popular support he had obtained, but with no
programme of action directed to the seizure of power, this
basis of popular support was useless. Jesus appears to have
hesitated a long time before the choice of appearing as the
Messiah and so focusing the nationalistic aspirations of
the Jews. He finally claimed the position, yet as a Messiah
who would not seize power but assume it by prayer, by
‘magic.’ Such was not the Jewish conception of the Messiah,
it seemed indeed to sincere Jewish patriots a betrayal of the
national revolution, and a familiar situation was enacted
when the Pharisees consolidated their power and that of
the Roman bosses on whom they depended by an impudent
appeal to the national feehng of the Jews. Jesus was thus
branded as a blasphemer — as ‘anti-social’

* Circa 1936, (Ed )

56

THE Bl^EATH 0| DISCONTENT

Thus, by his treatihent of the vital question of workers’
power, Jesus had from the start ensured the defeat of his
communist programme That part of the programme which
involved the actual coming into bemg of the communist
state became inverted, because it was to come into being m
a reformist way by its own ideal appeal— miraculously.
The Kingdom of Heaven therefore gradually became
‘the millenium’ and eventually was altogether shifted into
another world. The misery of the exploited classes of the
Roman Empire was first reflected as a revolutionary possi-
bihty now, but finally became a dream, a compensatory
wish-fulfilment hke that of other mystery religions, a
fantastic salvation criticising and yet stabihsing real misery
here. This reformist step appears to have been taken by
Christ at the very moment when he forbade Peter to use
violence. He was prepared to whip the money-changers
out of the Temple but not out of the State This fact itself
reflected the inabihty of the exploited classes of the Rc^nan
Empire to organise a revolt with any success. In spite of
Christ’s denunciation of rich men, a pohcy of class collabora-
tion was forced on Christianity by the demoralisation of
the workers.

When Jesus was executed, therefore, it was natural that
instead of regarding this as the first defeat in a long revolu-
tionary war certain of ultimate victory (as the proletariat
regarded the defeat of the Pans Commune) the followers of
Jesus decided to see it as an other-worldly triumph, as a
wish-fulfilment victory. But this apparently astute move —
no doubt quite naive and sincere — ^while it appeared to
consolidate Christianity, also finally consolidated the
reformist element m it. Since Jfsus’s victory was already
reahsed, it was merely a matter of waiting for the Kingdom
to come into being. The emphasis had already shifted from
revolution in this world to salvation in the next. None the

57

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

less the tougher quality of Christianit5^ as compared to the
mystery rehgions was shown m the fact that at least the
Kingdom of Heaven was to be realised soon in this world
The end of the world (i.e , the beginning of the ideal world-
commune) was at hand

The propagandist element of Christianity now centred
in the organisation of the Churches and the love-feast.
This was an attempt (rather like the modern co-operative
movement) to realise the primitive communism of the King-
dom of Heaven within the framework of the existing state,
through autonomous local communities.

All goods were to be held in common and administered
by officials, the poor were to be cared for. All were equal
within the Church or commune. The organisation had
therefore something of the character, not only of a co-
operative movement but of early forms of trade union
organisation with their friendly and benefit activities. Such
centres could be made active organs of revolutionary
activity in the Roman Empire

The movement grew rapidly. It had of course the
advantage of dissemination in the first stages by a cosmo-
pohtan body, the Jews, who were most active and influential
in precisely those places — the large towns — where devolution-
ary tendencies were most strongly marked. The fact that
Jesus had been executed by the native exploiting class
prevented Christianity from being a Jewish national move-
ment, and it soon spread to the uncircumciscd.

It became dangerous to the Empire when it began to
attract to itself all those elements of the ruling classes m the
towns and in the army who found themselves in opposition
to the centralising government of the Empire These were
the landlords so heavily taxed that they had to be ordered to
remain on their estates, and the dispossessed and expro-
priated anstrocrats and knights These, corresponding to

5 ^

THE BR^EATH OF DISCONTENT

the declassed or revoiutionary petite bowgeoisie of to-day,
gave a stiffening to what had been mainly a slave or
lumpen proletarian movement. Thus stiffened and organised,
Christianity had the courage openly to challenge the existing
State power. Christians ref used to worship the god-Emperor.
Sixjce the god-Emperor was the embodiment and focus of
the social forces of the Empire this was an open revolutionary
act ; and it was accompanied by the formation of illegal
self-governing units, the Church communes, which were
just as revolutionary challenges to the existing fabnc of
social relations as the denial of the Emperor’s divinity.

In spite of the general looseness and decay of the Roman
Empire this challenge had to be met, and whenever an
efficient Emperor was functioning, it was met by a vigorous
counter-revolutionary drive. All the familiar apparatus of
counter-revolution — slander, espionage, whipping up of
racial feeling (the ‘Nazarenes’) and provocative acts (Nero’s
burning of Rome) — were used in the struggle. Of course
the general dissolution of the Roman Empire ensured that
for long periods and in many provinces no counter-revolu-
tionary movement at all took place.

Christianity survived the persecution well. The growing
burden of centralism produced a communist and devolution-
ary feeling everywhere. The Army and the Civil Service
were infected with it ; it even invaded the Emperor’s
household. But Christianity had been committed by Jesus to
a fatal policy, that of passive resistance, or non-co-operation.
It is therefore possible that m the collapsing Roman Empire
Christianity played the same role as Gandhism m the collaps-
ing British Empire in India and was the means whereby
revolt was canalised and turned Into safe forms of activity.

This Itself m India is a reflection of the fact that Gandhism
is a peasant movement and the peasants form a class which
is not a class, which owing to the peasant’s isolation cannot

5P

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

act in an organised manner, its members can act only as
individuals. An individual cannot revolt forcibly; he cannot
set himself up against the whole State. He can only resist
passively 'to the death.’ This Christ did, and so did all the
revolutionary elements among his followers. The less
revolutionary elements recanted until the storms blew over
and this of course strengthened ultimately the forces of
reformism in the Church. The Roman exploited class was a
slave class divided into households and latifundia and
therefore unorganised. Christianity was an attempt to
achieve such an organisation on a metropolitan and area
basis, or, in the legions (where Christian cells were formed)
on a functional basis. But the whole pressure of rebellion
was towards decentralisation, and it was perhaps inevitable
that Christian revolt should be passive and non-co-operative.
Certainly it was correct in not attempting to bolster up or
seize the Imperial power, for it was this power which was
obsolete. Christianity’s role was to strengthen the decentral-
ising movements within the Empire by setting up autono-
mous local communes tied by fraternal understanding.
These were the Churches. But the early Christians were not
prepared to fight for the existence of these communes, and it
was this which brought about the defeat of the whole
revolutionary movement.

The most efficient Roman Emperor, Diocletian, attempted
to combat revolution with reform. While launching a
vigorous counter-revolution or ‘persecution’, he also
introduced a considerable amount of decentralisation in the
Empire, dividing it into four autonomous units. Although
this move was probably inevitable, it merely hastened the
disintegration of the Empire. Its increasing impoverishment
was bringing about a rapid devolution.

In remote Britain, however, Constantine had seen the
creative role of Christianity and its absolute inevitability in

So

THE BREATH OF DISCONTENT

the advanced disintegsation of the Empire. Local autonomy
was bound to come. With great shrewdness, he saw that
Christianity had also advanced to a stage where it could be
relied upon to co-operate with the powers against which it
was originally in revolt. Himself of proletarian ongin,
Cojastantine understood precisely the role Chnstiamty was
playing in relation to the masses. Like Hitler in a Germany
‘menaced’ with Socialism, Constantine, faced with the
menace of Christianity saw how to make this revolutionary
feehng the means of bringing him to power, not as a
revolutionary leader but within the framework of the
existing State. Thus Constantine’s legions, hke Hitler’s
Nazis, having been promised the fuU programme of revolu-
tion, swept him to power, after which he found no difficulty
in consolidating his position within the Imperial machine
and diopping the revolutionary programme.

In order to understand his success, it is necessary to bear
in mind the part played by the leaders of social democ.acy
in the period 1890-1936. They found themselves, like the
Christian bishops, priests and deacons, as elected officials of
organisations which were revolutionary in aim, having as
their goal in one case the estabhshment of sociahsm and in
the other, the estabhshment of the Kingdom of Heaven
(primitive communism), but both designed to realise part
of their revolutionary aims now — the trades unions and
parliamentary parties by gaming wage concessions within
the framework of capitalism, the Churches by friendly
and benefit activities among the poor. The elected
officials soon became permanent ones and eventually they
found themselves with commanding positions, honours,
and vested interests in maintamfhg on the one hand the
existing society and on the other hand the revolutionary
organisation which gave them their job. Hence the social
democratic leaders in all countries played the same part.They

6i

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

were prepared to co-operate in all tital matters with the
ruling class — the maintenance of law and order, the waging
of Imperialist war, the sabotaging of political strikes or
demonstrations, the stifling of extra-parliamentary action,
and the crushing of revolutionary socialism (Bolshevism).
At the same time they kept their organisations alive by ihe
expression of revolutionary sentiments, and by attacking
the ruling class on minor issues.

Constantine evidently found that the development of
Chnstiamty had produced in the revolutionary movement
just such a class of leaders. They were willing to ‘go over’
to the god-king in return for being given an important place
in the administration of the Empire. The administrative
class as a whole had no hesitation, in view of the general
scepticism of such an epoch, in ‘embracing’ Christianity.
The Church became Imperial and the bulwark of the god-
king’s power The completely insincere nature of Constan-
tmc^s bargain with Christianity is shown by the fact that he
himself never became a Christian

Thus the forces of the Christian revolutionary movement
were placed at the service of the counter-revolution. The
priests became State officials and the Churches State organs.
All the revolutionary content of the Christian programme,
the Kingdom of Heaven, the millenium, was shifted entirely
into the next world. The love-feast, at which material food
was shared in common, became the ideal sacrifice of the
Mass in which only a ‘token’ food was shared out. The
communion of goods dwindled to the administration of a
poor law by the priests. Christianity became a mystery-
religion, full of the neo-Platonism, Mithraism and Isis-cult
remnants derived from earlier mystery religions. At the
very moment when it buttressed the greed of the upper
classes, it started to preach to the lower the virtues of
abstinence, fasting, poverty, and self-denial. Such a betrayal

6 >

THE BB»EATH OF DISCONTENT

was of course only p4)ssible with a movement which had
already been bewildered, and from the start, by the reform-
ism of Jesus’s fatal choice: — ‘Render unto Caesar the
things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are
God’s,’ which seemed at the time such a clever escape
from a difficult political situation This bewilderment was
made permanent by the hailing of Jesus’s execution as
an other-worldly triumph, not a this-worldly set-back.
This again had seemed a clever move at the time. Yet,
like Sociahsm in Germany and Italy, Christianity had
been defeated by this refusal to place in the forefront the
vital question of power.

Of course the step taken by Constantine had been pre-
pared by the development of Roman economy. The leaders
of Christianity had already become wealthy and influential
persons in the society of their time. Constantine’s action
theiefore only regularised a process which had long been
going on below the surface. By incorporating Christianity
into the superstructure he stiffened it and enabled the Roman
Empire to survive, at least in the East. Christianity itself
was of course transformed in the process and became Greek
Orthodoxy, an organ of the State with a ritual, a pantheon,
and a Hellenistic monotheism which reflected the despotic
Imperialism round which it was built.

0 m ^ ^

The impoverishment of the Roman Empire, increasing
the incidence of taxation, had expropriated large numbers
of the land-owning class, in spite of the edicts forbidding
them to give up their estates. The attempt by the central
authority to squeeze still more surplus value from their
slaves often resulted in the nominal ‘freeing’ of slaves, and
the creation of serfs. It was in these circumstances that the

65

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYfNG CULTURE

local landowners, as well as the sla's^s, had welcomed the
freedom from centralised responsibility involved m the
communism of primitive Christianity. In the finish Roman
Imperial economy became an economy of local peasants,
serfs, decaying cities and harassed landowners. The revolu-
tionary content of Christianity now appeared as the revolt,
not (as originally) of the common people, but of the local
ruhng class. The Arian heresy and its successors was one
form of this: the breaking away of the Western Church was
another.

Meanwhile the barbarians penetrated the Empire — partly
by importation, to swell the declimng population of the
Empire, partly by actual conquest. They were sucked m
rather than invading it. Their social relations and pastoral
conceptions of status were more suited to an economy m
which wealth and money were vanishing.

In this disintegration the Church m the West acted as a
bulwark of the older civilisation only because she was a
bulwark of the older economy. In the worst days of the
Roman Empire, when reduction in population became a
social virtue, communities of men and women vowed to
chastity had assembled in the attempt to form a new
communism, now that it was no longer faced by a central-
ised and powerful government, proved successful, and
everywhere the Benedictine monastry sprang up, and became
the manor — the model agricultural unit. Meanwhile the
secular clergy, the bishop and the priest, had become
intimately associated with the economic life of the neigh-
bourhood m a way impossible to the Imperial agent. When
the barbarians trickled in, the Imperial tax-gathering
bureaucracy fled, but the priests and bishops, drawing and
consuming their tribute locally, stayed on. Thus the invaders
found themselves confronted by a homogeneity of organisa-
tion in the regions they penetrated, which was intimately

64

THE BREATH OF DISCONTENT

associated with the vefy life of the land. To disrupt this
would be to disrupt life itself, for economic production
would cease. At the same time the disappearance of the
Imperial agents, the number of absentee local landowners,
and the decentralising tendency of the Western Church,
made it possible for the land to be parcelled between
barbarians and Church without disaster. Thus Christendom
stood for these barbarians as something universal and
ordered and civilised — a Law given in the nature of things —
for the whole superior economy they penetrated and took
over revolved round it. They were therefore ‘converted’,
and not only were they themselves changed but they also
changed Christianity and increased the decentralising trend
of the Church by giving Christianity a ‘barbarian’ form.
Feudal social relations thus came into being and, just as
barbarians adopted the church, the church adopted feudal
forms of land tenure.

The Western Church found itself faced with the comptete
break-up of its European organisation as the result of feudal
autonomy. The only remedy was celibacy, and this already
existed in embryo m the form of monastic chastity, itself a
product of the dwindling of the Roman Empire’s wealth
and the hallmark of a faihng agncultural economy. By
making its officials celibate, the Church avoided the dynastic
trends of other Imperial officials, who had made hereditary
what was originally a delegated power. Cehbacy preserved
the centrahsed control of the Church without the need for
Imperial stratagems such as the continual shifting of officials.
A bishop could be safely allowed to become part and parcel
of the life of his neighbourhood^ jvithout the danger of his
founding a dynasty This (^BaS;^*n itself brought about a
separation between priestly and secular branches of the
ruling class unknown to any previous civilisations. Without
it, undoubtedly, the Western Church would have
c ^5

FURTHER STUDIES IN A D^ING CULTURE

disintegrated and disappeared inte) a number of local
churches.

Thus Christendom emerged m Western Europe as the one
universal idea because it was the one universal organisation.
Its courts, its law, its universal provision of salvation,
justice and learning, and its alms-givmg activities, were but
the reflection of its standardising and organising role in the
economy of Western Europe. There was a coming and going
of scholars and merchandise and commodities, there was
exchange of learning, a homogeneity of social relations, a
standardisation of agriculture and viticulture in Western
Europe, precisely because bishop and monastery provided
an interweaving substratum of organised agriculture and
trade, a higher level of technical production, which prevented
the Dark Ages from being really dark, from ever relapsing
into the anarchy of unorganised units. The clerical class
was the clerkly class, charged with the keeping of accounts,
of farm records, and all the administrative duties essential
to an organised agriculture. This power in society, trans-
cending local and territorial boundaries, was expressed in
the hierarchy of heaven, with its centrahsed Divine admin-
istration, its God, and the god-king on earth — ^the Pope of
Rome, and his various sacred representatives, bishops,
priests, and monks. It was expressed in the towns, made
possible by the organisation of Christian economy, and
therefore nghtly centred round the cathedral, the brilliant
expression of feudal life.

But the lay’ landlords, with their unfeudalised, dynastic
basis, found themselves, as they grew in intelligence and
organisation, eventually in sharp conflict with a celibate,
centralised, ecclesiastical organisation. The growing feudal
concentration expressed itself not only as a steady trans-
formation of social relations, but as a violent antagonism
between the feudal lords themselves, between the various

66

THE BRj^ATH OF DISCONTENT

summits of the lay feudal pyramids — ^the monarchies, and
between these and the Church, and the growing bourgeois
class in the towns; while exploited by them all was the mass
of peasants, descendants of the serfs and slaves of Imperial
Rome. Feudal landlordism was in any case doomed:
ultiipately it would succumb to a centrahsed monarchy
which would itself be only a stage in the emergence of the
bourgeois class created in the rising medieval towns. In
different countries the antagonism took different forms.
Where the monarchy and the bourgeois class joined against
a weakened feudalism, assisted by the oppressed peasantry,
a breach was made in all the fixed pnvileges of feudahsm.
A Reformation, the first step in the bourgeois Revolution,
then took place.

This Reformation voiced the' demands of bourgeois
production m the clearest way. Salvation was no longer the
monopoly of the feudal state organisation, but of the
individual freely electing for it. The Church was not a body
of faithful bound by overtly symbohsed social relations
(prayers for the dead. Purgatory, the Commumty of the
Saints) but a mere collection of individuals who sank or
swam separately according to the grace of God.

God now became arbitrary and dreadful. Corresponding
to a society where the individual appears to be naked,
dependent entirely on his own efforts in the face of nature,
and where all social relations such as alms-givmg, craft
agreements and pnce regulations were abandoned as fetters
on development, Calvinism emerged. In this form of religion
God’s will seemed immovable by the prayer of society and
confronted only the bare individual. Like an outside Fate,
it damned or saved him arbitrarily, not in spite of but
through his efforts Thus Protestantism accurately expressed
the true character of the bourgeois society m which the
individual is most subject to external ‘accident’, most

67

FURTHER STUDIES IN A D'/iNG CULTURE

helpless and unfree in the face of Fate, precisely because it
IS the society m which nominally the individual is most free
and most able to develop his inner will.

Many ‘heresies', such as that of the Albigenses, had
before this expressed the revolt of the exploited classes
against the feudal landlords. Only a revolt led byAhc
bourgeoisie and based on the lafge towns, could be success-
ful. Bourgeois and peasants and monarch were able for a
time to make common cause because their enemies were at
that stage the same — the big feudal lords.

Cathohcism and Calvinism, one representing the feudal
class, the other the bourgeois class, struggle and achieve
various compromises: the compromise of the Enghsh
Church (which is battered first by the Puritan Revolution
and then by the Industrial, Methodist and non-conformist,
Revolution, both representing developing petty bourgeois
interests): the compromise of the Gallican Church (with a
greater feudal mixture, which is shattered by the French
Revolution), of the various German Churches; of the
Spanish Church (m which the Crown ends by being identi-
fied again with the feudal, land-owning grandees); and of
the Netherlands. In all cases the bourgeois is placed m the
same anomalous position, in that the real fulfilment of his
creed — complete absence of social restraints — would lead
either to anarchy or communism. It would lead in both
cases to the abolition of the one social restraint by which he
lives — private property. At a certain stage of the Revolution
he is therefore forced to hold it back and support a counter-
revolution m order to prevent the peasantry (as Luther in
Germany), or the petty bourgeoisie (as in the Restoration of
Charles 11), or the proletariat (as the Thermidorians in
France) from throwing off their chains. He is forced to go
back on his nominal programme, and maintain the coercive,
c^ntrahsed State and the authoritarian Church in order to

68

THE BREATH OF DISCONTENT

maintain the basis of his class. This results in all the
illogical and bastard varieties of reformist Christiamty
which sprang into being with every stage of the bourgeois
revolution. Catholicism alone remains ‘pure’, as the expres-
sion of the land-owning and primarily peasant-exploiting
ruling classes, in Spam, Italy, South America and France,
or, alternatively, as the rehgion of those exploited classes,
even under bourgeois rule, who are exploited as peasants.
To such, Cathohcism, with its inverted world of rich dreams
to make up for the real misery of the peasant’s world, is
the necessary rehgion and, as in Ireland, will appear to ex-
press their interests as against a bourgeois imperiahst class.
Cathohcism is the religion of the special misery of the
peasant and also of the rule of the landowners, just as
Protestantism is the rehgion of the misery of the ‘free’
labourer and also of the rule of the bourgeois. The glories
and richly populated heaven of the Cathohc reflect the
meaner, barer world of the peasant, just as the sterner heaven
of the Protestant symbolises the less degraded existence of
the exploited proletariat.

The ‘logical’ end of the bourgeois religion was Deism.
The bourgeois class was a class which denied social relations
and, m doing so, necessarily denied all the symbolisations
of social relations in rehgion. Hence the Reformation
demanded the sweeping away of Purgatory, of the saints, of
all rites and ceremonies. Only the Spirit, indwelhng in man,
was left in Puritanism. This Spirit itself was simply the
symbol of Will as the bourgeois believes it to be — spontane-
ous, free, and undetermined.

Religion, however also symbolised man’s relations to
Nature through society. In so far as the social forces of
society — symbolised by God — are not all powerful, but
meet with checks and must obey ‘natural’ laws, there seems
something behmd God, something greater than man’s

%

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

idealisation of human will, and thisfmore powerful system
IS regarded as Fate, or God’s own edict which he will only
occasionally disobey by working miracles.

Now this order in nature is unfolded to view by man’s
very interpenetration with nature. Hence the superior
technical efficiency of bourgeois economy, beginning with
Gahleo and da Vmci, generated an increasingly over-riding
conception of this Fate or of God’s unchangeable Will
which, as more and more was learned about it, seemed more
and more impersonal, empty, and mechanical. Via Descartes,
Newton, Hobbes and the Encyclopaedists, this Fate became
a transparent Deism which was almost indistinguishable
from mechanical materialism, and became completely
atheistic at the most revolutionary period of bourgeois
struggle.

This itself was an expression of the bourgeois revolution-
ary movement. For it the world is automatic and mechanical
—the problem of life is not in society but in the environment.
AU social restraints must therefore be removed to permit
the maximum utilisation, investigation and exploitation of
the environment, i.e., of property. This attitude to God and
Nature became a charter of bourgeois revolution.

Such a movement inevitably meant that the propertyless
exploited class, the proletariat, whose help was always
demanded by the bourgeois in their revolutions, wanted to
go still further, and abolish the social restraint of property
which, by holding them in bondage, by arbitrarily and non-
scientifically carving up the environment, denied the
bourgeoisie’s own slogan: ‘Liberty, Equahty and
Fratermty.’

In practice therefore the bourgeoisie drew back before
Deism and from 1793 to 1936 there was a series of retreating
movements resulting in the maintenance of some kind of
Church or official church theology which was arbitrary and

70

THE BREATH OF DISCONTENT

coercive just as the bourgeois State in spite of its democratic
slogans was arbitrary and coercive — ^because the restraint
of property could only be maintained arbitrarily and
coercively. It became generally accepted that some rehgious
instruction was “good” for the people. Thus, although
already riddled with bourgeois criticism, rehgion was
officially maintained by the bourgeois class, even though
they themselves only partiaUy or prevaricatmgly believed in
it.

This was accompanied later by a similar retreat in science.
The recognition of the determined nature of the environ-
ment should have resulted in a recognition of the true nature
of that determinism in society as a whole. This would have
meant the destruction of the fundamental bourgeois position:
that unsociahsed bourgeois property is justified because the
bourgeois will is free in itself, the sole active centre in society.
Acceptance of this determinism would have led, not only to
the ‘naturalisation’ of humanity but also to the ‘humanisa-
tion’ of nature, which m the bourgeois scheme is mechanical
empty of human values and Newtonian. Instead of accepting
this interpenetration, which would have involved the rejec-
tion of the bourgeois illusion, bourgeois theory swung over
to the projection of the bourgeois human (not the scientific
human) mto nature. This led, as we show more fully in
the essay, Reality, to absolute Idealism, which marked the
final stage of" coercive bourgeoisdom — the arbitrary
Prussian State, with its negation of bourgeois theories of
freedom; a State which was yet maintained by the impera-
tive needs of bourgeois private property. In such a State
a Professor could be dismissed after writing a simple
book on ethics, by a decision of\he Prussian Minister of
Education which stated* ‘that it was not a single passage
which had given offence but the whole Scheme, and that a
philosophy which did not deduce everything from the

7 ^

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYInG CULTURE

Absolute could not be considered to be a philosophy at all '
The Absolute thus revealed itself in the role it was to play
thereafter — ^the absolute demand that the State should
protect private property and express the interests of the
ruhng class, even if it means war, economic disaster, and
starvation, a demand that makes the guardian of pnyate
property seem to tower above society as the totahtarian
State.

Thus the final disintegration of bourgeois culture is an
elaborate phenomenon. The Will of God or Fate has, by
the increasing technical achievement of the bourgeois,
become pausahty, but only as apphed to non-hving matter,
for the bourgeois cannot admit himself to be a determined
individual — ^to do so would be to uncover the determining
relations which are all social relations The consciousness
of these determining relations is simply Marxism, the world
view of the revolutionary proletariat Thus the bourgeois
reserves for himself an area of spontaneity or non-causahty
in all values m which the human mind is concerned, and
since there is no determinism there, they are all arbitrary
and might be anything. This is expressed in some such
formula as ‘Science leaves man free to believe what he will.'
‘Science applies to a different sphere from that of religion.’

Precisely because the development of bourgeois culture is
the development of individualistic anarchy, religion has
ceased to-day to be the expression of a coherent economy
and becomes mere individualism. For this reason religion
has become something widely abstracted from the concrete
existence of men — at the opposite pole from the indwelling
magic of the primitive, permeating all social life. The
disintegration of bourgeois culture is marked by the appear-
ance of thousands of different religions, systems of behef
and idealistic philosophies — ^theosophy, spiritualism, Oxford
Groupism, psycho-analysis (in its mystical form), Anthro-

72

THE BiJeATH of DISCONTENT

posophy, and also alUhe varieties of belief that have sprung
up within the nominal framework of one rehgion such as
English Protestantism. These religions are all alike in that
on the one hand, by their exaltation of the freedom and
spontaneity of the spirit, they give a wish-fulfilment con-
solation to the hard-pressed human creature helpless as
never before m the blind gnp of an anarchic society; and,
on the other hand, by their detachment of human values
from material, by their idealism, by their denial of science
and determination m all important spheres, they help to
maintain things as they are, and struggle against any
attempt of man to acknowledge and control the matenal
forces of society. Thus the very disintegration of religion
into all forms of mysticism and ideahsm, while it reflects the
demorahsation of the society that produces this, by no
means brings about an automatic collapse into rationahty.
On the contrary, this very disintegration and mysticism, this
haze of bewilderment and cross-purposes, serves ac a
conservative force and a barricade of counter-revolution.
To the counter-revolution every second gamed is precious,
however it is gained. All obstructions are aids and all haze
or darkness valuable. The struggle against the real material
misery of the world that produces this ideological haze must
be an active struggle not merely to shatter existing society
but to seize its forms and transform them; not merely to
deny existing bourgeois ideology but to fuse its shattered
fragments and use their content for a further ideological
advance. It is not a question of posing religion against
atheism; it is a question of turning an anarchic, neurotic
society into an organised and sane one. This is a revolu-
tionary task. ^

Beneath the ideological haze is an iron core, the main-
tenance by force of outworn social relations, the mainten-
ance of bourgeois private property. This was only secured

73

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

by the creation of the coercive State, and, as the revolt
against capitahsm grows stronger, so the State emerges as
more absolute, coercive, and irrational. It becomes the
Moloch to which decency, humamty, even religion itself
must be sacrificed, not for any reason given but as an
Absolute Imperative behind which we must not look, for if
we look behind it we shall find the simple clai m to profit.
It is just this Absolute which symbohses the bourgeois right
to property which now — no longer based on logic, reason or
convenience — becomes a new God, a God of Force and
Hate.

This new religion of bourgeois decadence is Imperialism,
the patriotism of the monopoly stage of capitalism. The
State comes first, all must be sacrificed to the interests of the
nation, including the fives of other nations and the health
and happiness of one’s own people. Because the bourgeois
property interests are interests now sharply opposed to
tho^e of the people as a whole, these interests and this State
now separate themselves from the people and appear as
Divine and Sacred entities whom to deny or attack is wicked,
a blasphemy beyond the blasphemy of religion. Religions
dating from early periods of capitalist development, before
the coming of monopoly, find their symbohsations to be in
conflict with the Moloch, and thus we find ranged against
the State, and its absolute claim to enforce the naked
property right of the bourgeois, large strata of the people
still professing the old bourgeois relisions, as well as the
class-conscious proletariat. This Moloch patrotism, bom
during the jingo period of British Imperiahsm and in the
Prussian State, reached a new height during thel914-18 War,
and has received its final expression in Fascism. Against
Fascism therefore appears a United Front of the proletariat
supported by many Christians — ^the past and the future both
ednying the outrageous present. In that straggle ideology

74

THE BREATH OF DISCONTENT

IS transformed and rekgion — ^in the actual struggle shedding
Its illusions one by one — finds its fantastic reahty sucked
into material reahty, and its inverted world stood on its feet.
It emerges as the self-feehng of a man who has found
himself in society — as the consciousness of a classless
soqiety.

The passage from which sentences are quoted on pp. 17-19
is given in full below.

The man who has found in the fantastic reahty of heaven,
where he sought a supernatural being, no more than his own
reflection, wfll no longer be satisfied to find only the
semblance of himself, only the unhuman, where he seeks,
and must seek, his true reality.

"The basis of irreligious criticism is* Man makes religion,
religion does not make man And, in truth, religion is con-
sciousness of self and the self-feeling of a man who has not
yet found himself or has lost himself again. Also, man is not
an abstract being existing outside the world. Man — ^that. is,
the world of men, the State, society. This State, this society,
produces rehgion — an inverted consciousness of the world —
because the world itself is an inverted world. Of this world
religion is the general theory, its encyclopaedic compendium,
its logic in popular thought, its spiritual point d’honneur, its
enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn completion, its
universal ground for truth and justification. It is the
imaginary reahsation of the human essence, necessary
because the human essence has no true reality The struggle
against rehgion is therefore, indirectly, the struggle against
that world whose spiritual aroma is rehgion.

"Rehgious misery is at once the expression of real misery
and a protest against that real misery. Rehgion is the sigh
of the hard-pressed creature, the heart of a heartless world,
the spirit of unspmtual conditiorj^. It is the opium of the
people.

"The removal of rehgion as the illusory happiness of the
people is the demand for their real happiness. The demand
that they should give up illusions about their real conditions

75

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

is the demand that they should give up the conditions which
make illusion necessary. Criticism of religion is therefore
at heart a cnticism of the vale of misery for which religion
IS the promised vision.

‘Criticism has torn away the imaginary flowers with which
his chains were decked, not in order that man should wear
his chains without the comfort of illusions, but that he njay
throw off the chains and pluck the living flowers. Criticism
of religion disillusions man so that he may think, act and
shape his reahty as one who is disillusioned and come to full
understanding, so that he may move on his own axis and
thus be his own sun. Rehgion is but the false sun which
revolves around him while he is not yet fully aware.

‘Thus it is the function of history, after the other-worldly
truth has collapsed, to estabhsh this world's truth. Then, it is
the function of philosophy, in the service of history, having
destroyed the supernatural semblance of man’s self-
alienation, to go on and destroy the secular form of this
self-alienation. Criticism of heaven thus turns into criticism
of the world, criticism of religion into criticism of law, and
critxism of theology into criticism of politics'*

* Karl Marx Introduction to a Critique of Hegers Philosophy of Law,

76

n

BEAUTY

A Study in Bourgeois ^Esthetics

W HAT is beauty"^ Is it a subject for discussion at all?

Can it be delBned m such a way as to provide a
foundation for aesthetics? Is it a product of art? Or of
nature?

To define: to hmit the boundaries, to give an outline to
the defined thing. Beauty, then, is defined by all that is not-
beauty. This not-beauty circumscribes, hmits, and defines
beauty. But beauty is not opposed by not-beauty, it is
opposed by ugliness. Yet the recognition of ugliness itself
involves an aasthetic 'faculty’, and sensibihties responding
both to beauty and ugliness, and it is not possible to say
where one begins and the other ends. Ugliness itself is an
aesthetic value the viUain, the gargoyle, the grotesque, the
Cahban, the snake-headed Funes, the triumph of Time’s
decaying hand, all these qualities interpenetrate with beauty,
and help to generate and feed it. All live in the same world.
Nowhere can we draw a distinct hne and say, on this side
lives the beautiful, and on that the ugly. All man’s experi-
ence, all the rich complexity of his sculpted, painted, written
art forms, all the elaborate multiform crowd of hvmg
animals and varied scenery, deny such a simple dichotomy.
All form one world even if it colitains opposites, and there-
fore the generating forces must lie at a lower level. Beauty
and ugliness, the noble and the petty, the sublime and the
ridiculous, all these opposite terms, when used m an (esthetic

77

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

way, involve each other, and must be> determined by other,
different quahties, from which they spring.

We do not respond to all beautiful things in precisely the
same way. The peculiar qualities of each thing colour the
emotion we feel with an individual unique shade. If it were
not so, the one beautiful thing would suffice; the one va^e,
painting, mountain would always be the sufficient stimulus
to our emotion. This is not so. Yet of course there must be
a hkeness in all our responses for us to group them as one,
as asthetic.

StiU more staking is the change in the responses to the
beautiful from age to age. No age is satisfied wholly with
the beautiful things of its forefathers, but produces other
things, to the measure of its desires, quite clearly different
from those beautiful traditions it inherits. This new vision
does not exclude the old, however. The old still seems
beautiful, but now its qualities are seen through a kind of
mist or aerial perspective of intervening time, changing and
toning its hues. The old beauty has been gathered up in the
new. And that age which is least able to rest content with
the beautiful things of the past, that creates things beautiful
to its eyes most different, most revolutionary and most in-
surgent, is precisely that age which seems to us most
in possession of beauty. W^e value the revolutionary,
dissatisfied art works of the Renaissance, and see nothing
in those of the Hellenising classicists or tired formalists
who mechanically repeat the beautiful things of times
gone by.

Man remains throughout this period much the same, but
the changing pageant of his art, his poetry, and his buildings
proclaims that at no stage does his idea of beauty remain
constant, but continually demands expansion and rejection.
All contents of the habitable world, of the known cosmos
even, come to share in this strange irradiation. The rich

78

BEAUTY

Americas, tke glassy .depths of the ‘deep abyss’, the spiral
nebulae, new birds and insects, jungles and swamps, the
silent Poles and the breathless Equator, acquire for man’s
eyes with each generation a novel aesthetic quahty and
become things of a nature undreamt of before this
time.

'Remembering this, we start to define Beauty. The man
looks at an object and calls it beautiful. This is a relationship
repeatable by this one man with perhaps thousands of
objects. What does it involve — ^what, in this subject-object
relation, is the Beauty?

It must be, not m one relation but in all relations of man
to object where man says: ‘This is Beautiful’. It must be,
therefore, something common to all beautiful objects and to
all men finding an object beautiful.

The simplest answer is to say that the man is common to
all objects, and therefore beauty is ‘in’ the man. Beauty is
a state of the man. To the bourgeois aesthete this ^^ery
simple solution of the problem seems so obvious that he has
no patience with anyone who can think anything else. This
IS the solution advanced by 1. A. Richards and C. K. Ogden:

‘Beauty is attributed to objects which produce coenaes-
thesia.’ *

The common term linking these relations wherein the man
.says ‘This is beautiful’ is therefore his ‘coenaesthesia’. Here
is a common term of the kind we sought for when we sought
for something similar in all relations of men finding objects
beautiful. Here then is a definition for beauty. Beauty is
coenaesthesia.

Coenaesthesia is a wide term, and really includes the
totahty of proprioceptive impressions as far as they give rise
to affects. Most neurologists picture the process as one in
which interoceptive stimuli — particularly visceral stimuli —

* v. The Meaning of Meaning by I. A. Richards & C K Ogden

79

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

give rise, via thalamic activity, to colorations of the conscious
field known as feehngs. Now it is quite plain that although
the sesthetic emotions are coensesthetic in this sense simply
because they are aflfective, all coenesthetic sensations are not
sensations of the beautiful. That would be to say that all
feehngs of pleasure or unpleasure are feelings of the beauti-
ful. Consequently the definition of Richards and Ogden is
inadequate. A pork chop, well done, may arouse strong
feelings of coenesthesia, but it is not beautiful — or hideous.
As an aesthetic object, it is neutral.

Why do the authors then amve at this definition"^ It is
in fact a typically bourgeois defimtion, beauty is a state of
the bourgeois. This is not very different from many other
bourgeois propositions springing out of the decay of bour-
geois philosophy after Hegel, shown by the rise of positivism.
In the same way Truth becomes an economical method for
the bourgeois of describing phenomena. Causality becomes
the way it suits the bourgeois to think of phenomena. And
so on. It is the product of a ‘tired’ philosophy.

The defimtion of beauty as coenaesthesia is the ultimate
product of mechanical materialism, of a philosophy that
defines the environment as ‘all that is not the bourgeois’,
while the Bourgeois stands outside it free and separate.
The world thus becomes divested of all values arising from
the relation of bourgeois to environment, for all such values,
since they contain the bourgeois, are abstracted from the
environment, for otherwise they would tie him to it. Such
a non-valued environment ultimately contains nothing
knowable and contains therefore nothing at all, but by the
time this is discovered bourgeois culture is in such an ad-
vanced stage of disintegration that it seems immaterial
whether the world is a real, coloured, qualified world or a
ghostly ballet of equations.

(i) If on the one hand the environment is robbed of all

8q

BEAUTY

values m which it "shares, the bourgeois is presented
With all such values. They are his. Beauty is in him.
But It is soon found that this by no means aggrandises such
values.

For what is the bourgeois, according to the mechanical
matenahst*^ A body, a group of electrons, a collection of
blood, bones, and neurones, subject to physiological laws,
conditioned reflexes, and ‘instincts’. Beauty and all similar
values thus become physiological activity. Having dissolved
the environment into moving molecules, atoms, ultimately
into tensors and moved all values into the bourgeois, this
type of bourgeois philosopher now starts to operate on the
bourgeois himself. He also is the environment to other
bourgeois; he also is matter. Therefore all the accumulation
of values stripped from the environment and concentrated
in him can now themselves quickly be shown to be nothing
but physiological functions, biochemical and electronic
phenomena — mere tensors.

This IS the bourgeois nightmare of a predetermined
Umverse which includes the bourgeois, from which he
shuddered away into absolute idealism.

(ii) If we start from the other end, with the mind as
primary, all qualities which partake of the environment are
stripped from mind. Applied to relations of the beautiful,
this involves that the singularities of the beautiful objects,
due to the way in which they differ among themselves, are
to be abstracted from these relations in order to discover the
essentially beautiful. The liquid eyes of the deer, the
massive solidity of the mountain, the fatness of Falstaff, the
coldness of an iceberg are qualities not common to mind
but peculiar to the objects on which mind rests They must
all be stripped away and finally, by removing all environ-
mental individualities from beauty as it mheres m beautiful
relations, we are left with absolute Beauty, the Idea or con-
ey/

V

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

cept of Beauty, which is homogeneous and bare of in-
dividuahties, and is therefore completely mental.

But the objects of beauty vary from generation to genera-
tion of men, and appear to have existed before men exist.
There is therefore a Beauty which is independent of the
brain. Thus we get the absolute Idea of Beauty existing
apart from the brains of men. This is that ‘Beauty’ of which
aestheticians talk; meaning nothing but an Idea, something
colourless, a kind of vague white-robed bare-footed personi-
fication going about the world. Such an idea is parasitic,
because it sucks an emotive colouring from aU beautiful
objects, and yet has denuded those objects of just that in
them which was the source of our dehght — ^their self-hood
and individuahty. It is death to Art, because in the artist’s
flair for the difference, for the newness, for the intrinsic and
peerless individuality of the beautiful object lies his power
to make new beauty. It is equally deadening to the lover of
beauty, for he loves beautiful objects — the daffodil, the
C6zanne— /or themselves^ not because in them is a manifesta-
tion of an Idea of the Beautiful. Thus, when the extremes of
bourgeois idealism and bourgeois mechanical materialism in
the realm of Value are reached, there is not so much differ-
ence after all — ^to both Beauty dissolves and becomes some-
thing homogeneous, empty, dead — coenaesthesia or the
Absolute Idea.

m * Hi ^

It is true of course that coenaesthesia enters into the
beautiful relation, just as a neuronic wave of potential
difference enters into the perceptual relation. How much is
there to this side of the story?

Let us pick out at random a few generalised qualities and
values:

Heat, Cold, Glory, Happiness,

Pleasure, Beauty, Fear, Pam.

82

BEAUTY

All these may be regarded as affective- Man feels happy,
pleased, afraid, feels pain, fear, that a thmg is hot, that a
thing IS beautiful. But of course, in the way these feehngs
arise, each expresses a relation of the man to his environ-
mental relation. Something makes man happy, he finds
sotxiething to be pleasant. Yet there is plainly a difference in
man’s use of these concepts. Happiness, fear, pain and heat
are all the accompamment of nervous disturbances, are all in
possession of a common physiological term. We locate
happiness in ourselves, and this we do also with fear and
pain, and yet we locate heat and beauty out there, m the
object.

We locate it as the outcome of our experience. Take the
concept of happiness. Expenence shows us that certain
obj'ects m certain cases are associated with happinesg, m the
other cases with not-happiness. We find that movement
away from those objects to others does not necessarily mean
the removal of unhappiness. We find that happiness has a
persistent quality through a large number of different T’
environmental situations. Happiness is common to these
situations. So is the T’. The environment is not common,
but changes in these situations; so we locate happiness mthe
‘F. A happy person is therefore to us a person who has in
him happiness.

■ But fear, or joy, while showing a certain congruity in
changing environmental situations, also show a certain in-
congruity. We may indeed find fear and joy persisting in
certain changes, but we may find a given situation, particu-
larly with fear, forcibly and abruptly changing the stabihty
of the ego, from happiness or bojedom to fear. Therefore
we conceive fear and joy," as a fear and a joy, separate and
impersonal, situated neither m the environment nor our-
selves, but abruptly breaking in on both.

A pain we locate in ourselves but yet as something alien

S3

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

to US which has gained a seat m us. This concept is necessi-
tated by our experience {d) that we act immediately by
withdrawing our bodies from the environment (therefore
pain is alien, imposed on us by the environment), (6) that
often pain cannot be so diminished but is still, after such
actions, present in our bodies, as for example a toothache^ or
the pain of a wound after the blow (Therefore pam is
inside us.)

Heat and cold we locate entirely in objects because
experience has shown us that movements of our body always
remove us from the source of heat or cold. It is therefore
not m ourselves, but the environment. In the sum of ego-
environment relations, happiness vanished while the environ-
ment remained but heat vanished when the environment
changed. Hence, just as happiness is located in the ego, heat
is located in the environment.

Finally beauty, like heat, and unlike pain, fear, joy,
pleasure or happiness is located entirely in the environment.
The object is beautiful; we ourselves do not feel beautiful
when we see a beautiful object.

In other words, it is man’s experience that beauty is an
objective quality — not wholly objective, because it is a
relation between subject and object — but objective in the
way that heat is. Like heat, beauty appears or disappears m
man’s conscious field according as he moves towards o'r
from the beautiful object in his enviionment. the object
Itself remaining unchanged during this process. That is
what men have felt when they called Beauty timeless, eternal.
Divine. But we have already seen that to accept this, to
separate the lover of beauty from beautiful objects, is to
make Beauty either a colourless Idea or a physiological
disturbance.

We find men agree about what is hot and what is cold in
aU ages. Moreover we can correlate differences of heat with

84

BEAUTY

differences of molecular movement and with the temperature
of man’s blood, above which temperature all seems ‘hot’
and below which, all seems ‘cold’. By inference, we hold
that these molecular movements w^ith winch heat is identified
were the same in character long before man existed. This
gives heat, m all its degrees, an objective existence indepen-
dent of man. It is now described or compared with other
qualities, (motion) more or less independently of the sensory
nerves.

But we do not find men agreeing about what is beautiful
in all ages. We find on the contrary that in each age.

(a) Men pick out different objects as beautiful, or pick
out different aspects or details of objects already recognised
as beautiful, for praise.

(b) Men not only pick out different objects as beautiful
(beauty in nature) but make different beautiful objects
(beauty m art) from age to age.

(c) Usually, however, the objects that earlier generatfons
found or made beautiful, are accepted by later generations
as beautiful, and the role of the later generation is that of
either adding to them by enriching our perception of them,
or subtly modifying our appreciation of their quahties.

We cannot find any non-^esthetic quahties in terms of
which beauty can be exactly described independently of man,
Although we can find non-thermal quahties m terms of
which heat can be exactly described. Thus we cannot infer
back to describe the beauty of the world before man came
into existence, we can only suppose that, ‘if man could see
such a world, he would find it beautiful’. But, to do so, we
must imagine the observer alreadj there; ourselves looking
at such a world; we cannot imagine the world as a ballet of
impersonal equations with the beauty expressed by these
equations, as they express the heat of molecular movement.

How are we to reconcile the fact that we regard beauty,

^5

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

unlike happiness, as a property of the environment, with our
failure to produce comparative environmental qualities, as
we can m the case of heat, which would suffice to determine
It independently of man*? We could only reconcile it if there
were a tnadity in the subject-object relation of man to
beautiful object, if in addition to naked subject and naked
environment, we had a third mediating term, something
which remained unchanged while the subject changed and
so could stand to it as environment and account for our
projection of Beauty outside ourselves, and yet which
changed while the bare environment remained unchanged,
which would account for the histone change in what par-
ticular objects are found to be lovely or made beautiful.

We have actually such a third term, we have aheady
referred to it, it is men as opposed to man — society. The
man as born, as innate, uneducated and ‘wild’, changes little
in the course of history, but of course he does not span all
huihan history; only mc/2-in-society does that. So in com-
menting on the change in man’s estimation of beauty from
age to age, we have already in fact admitted society as the
cause of change in beauty, of the coming into being of new
beauty. In commenting on the constancy of the environ-
ment throughout, we have in fact admitted that the objective
environment in which beauty is situated is social rather than
natural. If it were the unchanging environment in which
beauty was situated, how could it change? If man, substanti-
ally unchanging in his mnate make-up, faced the unchangmg
earth and stars without material mediation, how could an
ever-changing beauty be generated? But man sees nature
through social spectacles.^ ‘Spectacles’ is a partly incorrect
analogy, for man is a part of society, and nature is a part of
society. Society is a genuine middle term. To an individual
man society stands as environment, and is included with the
sun, earth and air. To nature, however, society stands as an

86

BEAUTY

active human force. 'Kie antimomes of beauty as a value can
therefore only be resolved by regarding it as a social pro-
duct, something secreted in the process of society. In the
process of society, all nature enters. Man measures himself
against infinite space, and takes his time from the sun. He
feejs the hot breath of the desert in his cities, and he goes
out alone or m bands to estabhsh himself in the jungles.
He moves on the face of the lonely sea in man-made ships.
The threads of social process penetrate, under the hands of
Einstein and Amundsen, Freud and Rutherford, Kepler and
Magellan, into remoter and remoter cracks of reahty. The
labouring masses of society root deep m the face of the
earth. The farmer sowing the fruitful praines, the lone
hunter in untamed woods, and the sailor on the ‘wine-dark’
sea are all parts of the social process. As such, the social
process generates everywhere beauty, not as a universal but
as a specific social product, just as it generates science,
pohtics, or religion.

We referred to the possibility of expressing heat m terms
of other, non-sensory, quahties, so that heat had an objec-
tive metrical scale, correlated to but independent of man’s
experience. If it were possible completely so to describe
heat, we should be discovering a self-contained, self-
determined world. The complete goal is impossible. The
'completely non-human self-determined world of physics
does not exist. There is something in heat as felt which can
only be expressed in terms of the observer. But none the
less such feeling, in its degree and appearance, can be com-
pletely determined by other qualities. Bourgeois philosophy
attempts to close one world or^he other, to make heat
objective or mental. Dialectical materialists refuse to do
this. Heat is determined by objective qualities but its
appearance contains a newness, something peculiar to it as
an event.

87

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

This IS equally true of beauty. Beauty is determined by
other non*£esthetic quahties, which account for its appear-
ance and disappearance, its change and development.
These qualities are not, as in the case of heat, kinetic, but
sociological, they arise from the interaction of systems of
men with the environment, in the course of labour processes.
Such sociological qualities are not aesthetic there is a distinct
realm of aesthetics. Beauty can only be known, felt or
described in the experience, and the experience is real, it is
not a chance iridescence on the surface of atomic clouds, but
a real intense property of the Universe. A man who had
never felt heat would never be able to imagine it from a study
of the kinetic theory of heat, however familiar he was with
motion. A man who had never seen beautiful things would
never know beauty, however complete his sociological data.
Beauty is social. It is objective because it lives apart from
me, in society. The snule of a Polycletan Hermes has quail-
tie’s, not only m me, but m the Hellas which produced it, and
all that has happened since and before to man. It is not,
however, merely resident in society considered as a group of
men. It stretches into all parts of the Universe because
society, as active subject, is related to all other reality as
object.

Happiness is not a social product, any more than a man
is a social product. It is true that happiness arises out of the
relation of me to my environment; my experience generates
it. But it is like my flesh, instinctive and unsophisticated.
It is like sorrow, anger and love, a quality which is as yet
untransformed by society and is born the same m each man.
It is genotypical. I, as ^individual subject, generate it in
relation to the environment, as object. It is not independent
of the environment, any more than my body is in its health.
But happiness is not a social product any more than iUness,
which is produced by the environment, is a social product.

88

BEAUTY

We need not suppose 4t will always be so. A day may come
when man, become increasingly conscious of himself, may
be able to make happy things, a happy environment, as he
makes a beautiful thing. Happiness will then seem to him
like beauty, not in himself but in his environment. He will
be the creator, not the slave, of happiness and sor'row, as he
IS now the creator of beauty and ughness. Then perhaps
happiness will seem higher than beauty, or perhaps it
will seem as if beauty, by a simple expansion, has
taken up happiness within itself, and it is still beauty,
but a larger, more universal beauty which we serve, a
happmess which we now consciously create and actually
see.

Beauty is not alone in playing a dual role as object to the
individual and subject to the environment. Morality and
goodness are the same; they are conceived of as greater than
man and outside him, and yet change with society and are
not expressible except in sociological terms. God as‘ he
appears in all myths, religions and metaphysics, is such a
value. Just as Beauty, imagined as areal indwelling goddess,
ceased to exist at a certain stage m social development, and
yet beauty the objective value persisted, so God, conceived
as a person, to-day ceases to exist, and yet morality and
goodness, as objective values outside the individual, persist.
^Both are social products. Truth is another such value. We
cannot conceive truth apart from a true statement —
something human, and yet we know that truth is not just
what I, the individual, think to be true. Truth is a social
product; it is a particular relation of the individual, via
society, to the rest of the Univers|.

But truth, goodness, and beauty are not ‘just’ social pro-
ducts. Their specific social roles, in which man as individual,
men as society, nature as environment and reality as includ-
mg individual and society and environment, all figure, differ

^9

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

among themselves and generate their peculiar quality. What
is this pecuhar quahty in the case of beauty‘s Beauty tells us
something, not as a statement tells us something, but as a
glance tells us something. It is the apprehension of a genuine
quahty. A beautiful thing has a significant content, just as
a true statement has. But it is not the same significance.
What is this difference between true statements and beautfiul
things'^

In the course of the contact of the individual with reahty,
he experiences various emotions. These emotions, or affects,
are new qualities. Instinct is what we call a simple repetition
of hereditary habits, the mechamcal reappearance of the old.
Such simple responses to external or internal stimuli change
from age to age, but, m relation to the rapid tempo of social
life, there is a consistency about them which leads us to
separate them as hypothetical entities, the instincts. Situa-
tions which, while evoking instinctual responses, do not
permit their emergence unchanged, but cause a suspension or
interruption of the pattern, produce affects or emotions.
The result of such a situation is the transforming, or con-
ditioning (Pavlov), repression or subhmation (Freud) of the
response. Thus the affects or emotions am the sign at once
of an instinctive response and of its change m a certain
situation or subject-object pattern.

The instincts as mechanical responses are unconscious.*
It is consciousness itsplf— a particular group of innervations
and their relation to reahty — ^which calls them ‘unconscious’.
What It means by this term is: ‘not included with us’. But
all innervations, being innervations of one nervous system,
are related. Thus even |Jie unconscious group, those in-
nervations ‘not included with us’, are in indirect connexion
with the conscious group. In so far as they leave mnemic
traces, unconscious innervations can be known by conscious-
ness. The nature of this ‘unconscious’ excluded group is

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such that they leave cfude mnemic traces but, once left, these
traces are endunng. Unconscious ‘memories’ are simple,
poor, and permanent; conscious memories are subtle, nch,
and fluid.

Affects are conscious. A feeling is felt. But the affects, the
emptions, emerge as a specific relation between a situation
and an innate response. The relation between situation
and response generates these emotions. Consciousness is
a relation of two unconscious terms, body and environ-
ment.

The organism encounters situations through its extero-
ceptive neurones, through sight, hearing, touch, and smell,
of which in man sight and hearing are dominant. The organ-
ism has responses because of innate potentialities buried in
It, in its chromosomes, in its sympathetic and parasym-
pathetic systems, in its visceral innervations. Of course there
is no gulf between situation receptors and response-effectors.
The eye itself has innate responses; and stimuli arise in&ide
the organism. A stomach ache is a situation. But the
situation is sensory, is external, the response is somatic, is
interior.

An emotion which expresses a particular new relation
between a situation and a response therefore has both a
, sensory component and a somatic component. It is not a
mixture, it is a quality — a relation of two terms. The situa-
tion appears as the form: the present situation as a percept,
sound heard, odour smelt or tactile sensation; the past
situation as a memory. The response appears as the feeling
content, as the fear, desire, or boredom associated with the
presentation. Both are intimateli^ mingled. In thought the
situation appears as the memory-image, thought, dream and
so forth, and the response as the feehng tone, or affective
colouring of the thought. In reflection, affective tone and
percept are more closely entwined, for whereas the organism

9 ^

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

is the same, there is no real situation ‘outside-now’. The
affect has almost sucked up into itself the sensory presenta-
tion; hence the possibihty of imageless thought.

Thus all consciousness may be regarded as groups of
entities which may be divided into feelings, the content; and
situations being met or remembered, the form, Feehngs are
common to all contents, but the form is different for present
and for past situations. The form of the one is a percept;
of the second, a memory or thought. But the affect differs
subtly according to whether the form is a memory or ajpercept.

A thing may be unconsciously perceived if it evokes no
new response. It is habitual, always there; we do not notice it.

The field of consciousness therefore represents the ingres-
sion of the new into the organism-situation relation. The
affective basis is the organismal basis and the thought or
perceptual form is the situation form. But they completely
interpenetrate; they are not separable. They determine each
otlfer. Each change m consciousness involves a change in
the environment. Of course, for each component of consci-
ousness, the change may be chiefly orgamsmal or chiefly
environmental. This difference of degree, which never
proceeds so far as to enable us to call any component
absolutely one or the other, is important. Too ‘pure’ a
percept, or too ‘deep’ a feeling is in either case unconscious.^
It is not the purity or vividness of either that consciousness
expresses, but a change in their relation, an impact of the
two. Consciousness is therefore change, it is the mgression
of the new. It is the seat or aggregation of the novelties in a
man’s relations with reahty. Such new qualities clump to
form a conscious field, aSfhacteria clump m serum. The field
is not static, it grows, changes and expands. It is not self-
determined, on the contrary the field is the expression of the
determining relation between the organism and the rest of
reahty.

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BEAUTY

In examining these aontents we may sort them so as to pay
special attention to th& forms, to the percepts and memories
of situations encountered in reality, to the bits of reality
apparently embedded m consciousness.

The study of consciousness then becomes a study of the
bits of reality embedded m consciousness, or the portions of
outer reality in the conscious field. There is a tendency to
call the outer reahty quite simply ‘Reahty’, so that this
sorting becomes the study of reahty.

The objective of such a study is truth. It is the goal of
science. In so far as the ‘situation’ portions of the conscious
field separate themselves out, a greater and greater grip of
reahty is presumed to be obtained. Such a programme is of
course the programme above aH of ‘physics’.

But j'ust because all contents of the conscious field, in so
far as they represent the ingression of the new into the sub-
ject-object relation, contain both emotion and percept,
feeling and memory, it is never possible in fact to fin& a
conscious quality which is all situation and bare of feehng.
The following-out of the programme of physics therefore
gradually strips the world of reahty of all quahties in consci-
ousness in which a feehng tone or ‘subjective factor’ is
concerned. This means stripping the real world, the object
of science, of all reahtj^. It becomes simply a group of
equations.

But equations are mental. They represent the laws of -the
comparison of quahties between themselves. Thus the real
world becomes virtually nothing — unappetising and bare of
interest. It becomes, finally, meaningless. Thus although
science, alone of activities, has as .its goal objective truth and
the extracting from consciousness of the ‘pure’ situation
elements, this will, if carried to its utmost extent, rob truth of
truth. For truth imphes some affective attitude, some
relation of organism to environment, by which it 13 gener-

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FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

ated. Truth can never be a criterion o# a complete system of
metrics, considered as self-sufficient in themselves, for the
circle of metrics is closed. They constitute a world in them-
selves. The only criterion here is consistency. The question
we ask of metncs is. Ts the world fully closed‘s Do we arrive
back finally at our initial axioms?’ Now this consistency is
quite different from what we mean by truth, the goal of the
scientist, which spurs him on in his arduous labour.

What then is this Truth? For what do we m fact search the
field of consciousness in its name? The field of consciousness
is not static, it is generated by change. Consciousness is the
product or affective heat of a clash between the response of
the organism and a situation to which the response is not
exactly geared. The impact, changing both, is preserved in
the organism’s behaviour as a modification and in its consci-
ousness as a feeling and a thought. This conscious field
changes; it has its laws of flow and recombination. Man
thinks, plans, wills, introspects. Consciousness is the con-
tinual ingression of the new. Consciousness is the sign of a
behaviour modification Man ‘learns’ by experience, by the
ingression into his organism of the new. Consciousness is
the result of interaction, and is a guide to action.

But action implies the organism. The organism acts. If
consciousness is simply the individual’s sum of behaviour
modifications, available as a guide to fresh situations, if each ’
impact changes organism and environment, truth is a
criterion of action. A component of consciousness is only
generated by a tension between response and situation
which do not fit like hand in glove, and because there is a dis-
crepancy there is energy#- heat, perception, feeling, as the
hand is forced into the glove and as a result hand and glove
are both altered in shape. Truth then is given man in his
attempt to change the world. In changing it, of course, he
changes himself.

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BEAUTY

That is why scienceis never hypothesis alone. It is always
hypothesis plus experiment. In the experiment there is a
tension or contradiction between man’s behefs — ^the sum of
his responses as a result of previous experience — and a given
situation — ^the crucial experiment or discovery of a piece of
reahty which does not fit the response. As a result the hypo-
thesis is changed. Man’s consciousness is changed.

Hence science’s history is a continual modification of
hypothesis by experiment. As the result of each modifica-
tion, man’s relation to objective reality is changed — he alters
from a being at the centre of the Umverse to one on the
limits of it, and then to a man in no absolute place. Truth
always appears as a result of man’s successful interaction
with his environment. Always he can only find truth by
changes and reahty. By analysing, by setting up a mock
world in the laboratory, by moving his position somewhere
to view an echpse, by making expenments in artificial light-
ning — ^in aU such ways he changes reality, and all these are
precursors to far vaster changes — ^bridges, ships, roads,
tiUed land. Each time, in altering reality, he generates new
truth, and finds it only thus.

Hence, except m action, truth is meaningless. To attempt
to find it in a mere scrutiny of the conscious field, by ‘pure’
thought, results not in truth but in mere consistency. The
contents of the mind are measured against themselves with-
out the incursion of a disturbance from outside, which dis-
turbances in fact, in the past history of the field, are what
have created it. Since innumerable consistent worlds are
possible, there would be as many criteria of reality as there
were people with difierent consciciis experiences.

But action upon nature demands co-operation if it is to be
fully effective. The organism which wiU be most in pos-
session of truth, which will most deeply penetrate and widely
change the environment, will be an organism able to co-

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FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

Operate with other organisms in that change. The very
combination, by division of labour, produces a qualitative
change What millions of organisms do separately is nothing
compared to what they can do in co-operation to a common
goal. Truth appears as an outcome of the labour process, for
It is the labour process that demands and at the same time
dictates the co-operation of organisms.

Thus a mediating term now appears in truth, which we
first analysed as an outcome of the bare organism faced by
bare environment. But now the bare organism faces society
and Its culture, and the bare environment faces, not the lone
organism, but the tremendous apparatus of co-operating
men.

In fact this occurred from the very beginning. The labour
process itself generates the co-operation which changes and
expands the responses of the organism, and gives nse to
sufficiently many new situations to make it possible to talk
of ‘truth’. From the very start the labour process, by the
society it generates, acts as a mediating term in the produc-
tion of truth.

From the very start the labour process gives rise to
material capital. Simple enough at first, taking the form of
mere tools, customs, raagico-scientific objects, seeds, huts,
these were yet all-important as the beginnings of culture.
To our argument they bear this important relation, that all
such enduring pioducts represent social truths. The plough
is as much a statement about the nature of reality as the
instructions how to use it. Each is useless without the other;
each makes possible the development of the other. All these
social products are generated by the nature of reahty, but
their form is given by the organism m its interaction with
reality. The nature of fields and plants imposes on the
organisms specific types of co-operation in sowing and
reaping and determines the shape of the plough It imposes

qS

BEAUTY

on them language, wl^ereby they signify to each other their
duties and urge each other on in carrying them out. Once
estabhshed the labour process, extending as remotely as
observation of the stars, as widely as organisation of all
human relations, and as abstractedly as the invention of
numbers, gathers and accumulates truth. Faster and faster
it proliferates and moves. The bare organism is to-day from
birth faced with an enormous accumulation of social truth
in the form of buildings, laws, books, machines, pohtical
forms, tools, engineering works, complete sciences. All these
anse from co-operation; all are social and common. Gener-
ated by this capital, truth is the past relation of society to the
environment accumulated m ages of expenence. It is actu-
ally created by the conflict of social organisms with new
situations in the course of the labour process.

But the very richness and complexity of this ‘frozen’ truth,
the very elaborateness of an advanced culture and a function-
ing society, ensures that the naked orgamsm will be ccn-
fronted with the greatest possible variety of ‘situations’
This will ensure the greatest possible activity of a man’s
consciousness, and the maximum of mutual transformation
of his responses, his instincts, and the material environment.
There wiU be a rapid ingression of newness. This itself will
generate new truth. Man, as expenencing individual, will
find himself constantly negatmg the truths given in his social
environment.

Thus we see the cause of the apparent antinomies in
truth. Truth appears to be in the environment, to be objec-
tive and independent of me. Yet the attempt to extract a
completely non-subjective truth from experience pro-
duces only metncs. Moreover the environment changes
only slowly, but the truth of science or reality as known to
man, has changed rapidly.

Truth, then, is in my environment, that is, m my culture,

D 97

FURTEHR STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

in the enduring products of the labour process. Thus
truths, although similar m their lack of newness and fixation
to my inherited responses, are yet different in that responses
emerge from the unconscious, inside me, whereas the
inheritances of culture come to me as ‘situations’, as things
learned, taught, or told me, as experience, as environment.
But I do not regard myself as bound to the social criteria of
truth; on the contrary it is my task to change their formula-
tions, where my experience contradicts them.

^

But, it will be urged, we were to discuss beauty, and now
it is only truth we have obtained. Writing when bourgeois
Enghsh poetry was at its height at the same time as bourgeois
German philosophy was reaching its climax, Keats said;

“Beauty is truth, truth is beauty” — that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

A modern bourgeois poet, T. S. Ehot, has announced
himself unable to understand these lines of Keats, just as
modern bourgeois philosophers show themselves unable to
understand Hegel’s dialectics. But we saw that the pursuit
of truth was the study of the objective elements in the
conscious field. We saw further that completely objective
elements could never be obtained. A world built up in
such a way dissolved into mere metrics, and truth became
consistency. To every percept and thought, an affect or sub-
jective tinge inevitably attached itself. We never had a mere
situation but always a response to a situation.

Thus truth never stands by itself as ‘pure’. It is always
generated in action, m instinctive organismal response
going out into the situation and modifying both itself and
the situation, begetting emotion as a result. Absolute,
state, eternal truth is thus impossible.

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BEAUTY

But every such action involves a desire, a volition, aim,
fear, disgust, or hope. Thus truth is always tinged with the
subject and with emotion. This is not a discoloration. As
we saw, any thoroughgomg attempt to wash truth clean of
such affective discoloration simply washed the world away,
for It becomes bare geometry. We do not feel ourselves
passively responding to a situation, we feel active and sub-
jective and seats of mnovation Necessarily so, because each
transaction with a situation changes us, and therefore makes
us a new centre of force. This is expressed directly in consci-
ousness.

If we sort out of consciousness all the subj'ective elements
we now orientate the same field in an entirely different way.
The connection between conscious contexts is no longer
outer reahty, but the responses. We now group all the
conscious contexts into hke responses (love, fear, self-
preservation). The laws of thought now become the laws of
affective association. The affective association of ideas dis-
covered by Freud, which threw a flood of hght upon dreams,
IS not so much the discovery of a secret connexion as a law
arising from our mode of analysis of conscious contents.
If we sort them according to the responses or somatic com-
ponents, we discover ideas to be affectively associated. If we
sort them according to the situation or environmental com-
ponents, we find them to be associated by contiguity and
other laws taken from the environment. Both methods are
equally correct. Both affect and thought, both response and
situation, are given in the one conscious glow.

When we are concerned with dream and day-dream,
attention is introverted, the body j>eases to be closely con-
cerned with the situation. The response or instinctive
element in consciousness then becomes dominant. Hence the
value of the Freudian or affective analysis of consciousness
in such states. The 'deeper’, and more somatic, the mnerva-

99

FURTHER STUDIES IK A DYING CULTURE

tions, the more dominating becomes the response. The more
external, and sensory the innervations, the more dominating
becomes the situation. The environment rather than the
instinct gives the mam clue to the structure of the perceptual
field; the response lays bare the secret structure of the
phantastic field.

A development may take place The body may be intro-
verted, and unconcerned with its immediate environment,
and yet it will not be dreaming, it will be thinking. It will be
striving to mould its dream according to the nature of all
past situations, according to its experience of outer reahty.
It will be attempting to realise the laws of outer reahty, and
penetrate its nature. This is science. It is a scientist think-
ing, however crudely, for there has been genuine synthesis
between almost unconscious dream full of somatic drives
and conscious perception, full of environmental shape.
These have been fused m thought. Dream draws vividness
and restraint from perception; perception gets a flexibility of
recombination, an onward drive to a goal, from dream. The
result is thought, as rational scientific thought.

But the same development leads to another. Behaviour is
not only intra-somatic and conscious; it is also overt and
visible in action. The organism is conscious, and is acted on
by the environment, but it also behaves and acts on the
environment. In its behaviour it is guided by perception, but
perception cannot present it with a goal. Perception guides
it but it is impelled by ‘instinct’. The somatic element in
consciousness now figures as a programme for change —
what we ‘want to do’. In trying to bring about our wishes,
they too are transformeS.

But perception is not ‘pure’ perception — perception only
of the present situation. By introversion, by stiffening
dream with the memories of past perceptions, perception has
become ‘rational’ thought- Perception is widened into a

100

BEAUTY

general scheme of reality as experienced over a time.
Reason, or congealed cogmtion, now guides instinct. In
helping to change the environment, cogmtion too is modified
and becomes truer and subtler.

But how can I by myself effect more than the slightest
change in my environment? I need the co-operation of other
men. But this involves perceptions held in common: we
must all have similar views of reahty. Reason and percep-
tion therefore become social, become crystallised in
languages, tools, techmques. This has the advantage that I
can now draw not only on my brief expenence of percepts,
but on the combined and sifted experiences of thousands of
generations, preserved in language, tool, or technique.
This has become dominating. Even from the start it was so;
man found himself, by the necessities of the labour process,
sharing a common view of reahty, and inheriting the seeds,
experience, and advice of a preceding generation. Even
before language, the labour process, if it involved oixly
common hunting tactics not inherited but taught, would
involve a common world-view however crude, and would
generate a Truth resident not wholly in oneself but also in
one’s environment. Thus long before science has a name or
a distinct existence, it is generated as a social product.
Truth is created and extended before the concept could
exist, as part of the labour process.

But the labour process, involving a social view of the
necessities of the environment, a general consciousness m
man of laws existing outside him in reality, involves also a
social unity of response to these necessities and this environ-
ment. The interaction produces a ^ange, and as the change
becomes more willed, it generates increasing consciousness
not only of the structure of reahty but also of one’s own
needs. The goal is a blend of what is possible and what is
desirable, just as consciousness is a blend of what is response

lOI

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

and what is situation. Or, to be mere precise, just as con-
sciousness is the product of a tension between response and
situation which do not precisely fit each other, so the goal
is a product of a tension between what is possible and what
is desirable. They are forced to meet; they are synthesised;
and as a result both are changed, are fused into an attainable
goal. Of all possibles and all desirables, the laws of reality
enforce only one wedding, and the child is a new generation.

But if the desirable is to be held clearly in mind, if all
action is somatically motivated, or willed, and therefore has
an affective as well as a perceptual element — ^then there must
be a community of desire as well as a commumty of percep-
tion. There must be a commumty of instinct, as well as a
community of cognition. The heart, as well as the reason,
must be social. The community must share a body in
common, as well as an environment in common. Its hopes,
as well as its beliefs, must be one. This hope, which is the
opposite to science, we may call art. Just as Truth is the aim
of science, Beauty is the end of art.

But both deflate abjectly if we attempt to isolate them.
If we try to get them ‘pure’ we get nothing. Both are pro-
ducts of the living organism in the real world, and this means
that every element is determined both by organism and
environment.

We saw that the pursuit of Truth, and the separation of
all environmental elements in the conscious field, produced
not Truth but consistency. It produced an unreal de-
materialised world, devoid of quality; in fact a mere series
of equations. The pursmt of Beauty, and the separation of
all affective elements imthe conscious field, produces not
Beauty but physiology. We get merely the body with its
reactions.

But both Truth and Beauty are in fact generated already
blended m action, in the social labour process visualised

102

BEAUTY

throughout human history. In this they are indivisible.
Both continually play into each other’s hands. Science
makes the percepts, the possibihties, the world with
which the body’s desire concerns itself, continually ncher
and more subtle. Art makes the body’s incursions into
reahty always more audacious, more curious, and more
indefatigable.

Of course to the bourgeois with his ideal closed worlds,
Truth and Beauty, art and science, appear not as creative
opposites but as eternal antagonists^. Even Keats who saw
their kinship, could yet complain that science had robbed the
rainbow of its beauty. This is because science and art, as
long as they seem something distinct, situated in the environ-
ment entirely on the one hand (science) and in the heart
entirely on the other (art), must seem exclusive and inimical.
They seem to raise up two different worlds, of which we can
choose one only. One is bare of quahty, and the other is
destitute of reality, so that we cannot rest easily on either
horn of the dilemma. Only when we see that the separation
is artificial and that response and situation are involved
throughout consciousness and are part and parcel of the
social process which generates both truth and beauty — only
then can we see that there is no such deadly rivalry as we
supposed but that on the contrary these opposites each
create the other. The ‘secret’ connection between the two is
the world of concrete society.

In all social products, therefore, affect and percept,
response and situation, mevitably mingle. They do not
merely mingle, they activate each other. In language every
word has an affective as well a^a cogmtive value. The
weight of each value varies in each case. Some words, such as
interjections, are almost entirely affective. Others, such as
scientific names, are almost entirely cognitive. But an
entirely affective language — that is, soimds having only

103

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

affective associations — ceases to be language. It becomes
music. An entirely cognitive language — that is, sounds
having only cogmtive associations — also ceases to be a
language; it becomes mathematics. In doing so, both seem
to exchange roles. Music no longer refers to outer reahty;
but it does not disappear into the body; it becomes for the
body outer reality. For the body, hstening to the music, the
sounds are now environment; nothing is referred to.
Mathematics, though it has no affective reference, does not
disappear into the environment. On the contrary it becomes
pure thought; it becomes the body operating on the environ-
ment. Cognition and affection can never be separated. The
attempt to do so simply begets a new thing, in which they
are united again.

Not only language but all social products have an affective
role. Each society evolves its own gestures, deportment, and
manners. These include a reference to reality, a pointing to
something, the necessary opening of doors to get through
them, or lifting of food to feed oneself, or moving of legs to
get from one place to another. But these actions also include
an affective element* all can be done ‘beautifully’ or artistic-
ally. One can point with an air, open a door politely, feed
oneself quietly and ‘off silver’, walk slowly and with dignity.
All this is beauty; all this is desirable; all this is a social
product. Different societies have quite different notions of
what is desirable in these things.

All objects, from a house to a hat, share these cognitive
and affective elements. A hat has a real cognitive environ-
mental function, so has a house. The hat must keep rain and
sun off our heads; the^house must keep out wind and
weather, resist perhaps the robber and marauder. But both
are modified by the affective element. The hat must add
honour, dignity and grace to the head. The house must
express respectability or power; and must contain rooms of a

104

BEAUTY

certain shape and size, because of the manners and social
customs of the age.

Action designed only to express an affective purpose
becomes, hke music, an environment; dancmg is a spectacle.
Action designed only to express a cognitive purpose, and to
achieve a goal which is not in itself really desired, becomes
action in itself desirable, as m the mock-flights and trivial
goals of sport, in which aU energies are bent on securing
something not really to be desired. Between sport and
dancing stretch all the forms of action designed to secure an
affective but real goal, that is, all forms of work, from
sowmg and reaping to factory production.

AH forms of representation have the same duality. The
faithful congruence of representation to reahty, robbed of
all affective elements, becomes not really a representation at
all, but a symbol — ^the diagram. The attempt to make repre-
sentation purely affective, without reference to environment,
produces what is in itself an environment — the town and-the
building. Between hes the richness of pictonal illustration —
the painting, the sculpture, the film, and the play.

In primitive civilisation this intimate generation of truth
and beauty in the course of the labour process and their
mutual effect on each other is so clear that it needs no
elaboration. The harvest is work, but it is also dance; it
deals with reahty, but it is also pleasure. All social forms,
gestures, and manners have to primitives a purpose, and are
both affective and cognitive. Law is not merely the elucida-
tion of a truth in dispute, but the satisfaction of the gods, of
the innate sense of rightness in man’s desires. Myths express
man’s pnmitive instincts and his^yiew of reahty. The sim-
plest garment or household utensil has a settled beauty.
Work is performed in time to singing, and has its own
fixed ceremony. All tasks have their lucky days.
Truth and beauty, science and art are primitive, but at

D* /05

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

least they are vitally intermingled, eacjt giving life to the
other.

It is the special achievement of later bourgeois civilisation
to have robbed science of desirabihty and art of reality. The
true IS no longer beautiful, because to be true in bourgeois
civilisation is to be non-human. The beautiful is no longer
real, because to be beautiful in bourgeois civilisation is to he
imaginary.

This itself is simply a product of the fundamental bour-
geois position. Our own proposition about beauty is this:
whenever the affective elements m socially known things
show social ordermg, there we have beauty, there alone we
have beauty. The business of such ordering is art, and this
applies to all socially known things, to houses, gestures,
narratives, descriptions, lessons, songs and labour.

But to the bourgeois this proposition seems monstrous,
for he has been reared on the anarchy of the social process.
HCrefuses to recognise it. He recognises only one social
process — commodity-manufacture, and one social tie — ^the
market. The bourgeois produces for and buys from the
market, governed as an individual by social relations
masquerading as laws of supply and demand.

Thus any attempt at social consciousness which neces-
sarily involves the manipulation of desires, Le. of ‘the laws’
of supply and demand, seems to him outrageous. But this is
just what art is — the manipulation or social ordering of
desires, and therefore of the laws of supply and demand.
Art gives values which are not those of the market but are
use-values. Art makes ‘cheap’ things precious and a few
splashes of paint a social treasure. Hence the market is the
fierce enemy of the artist. The bhnd working of the market
murders beauty. All social products, hats, cars, houses,
household utensils and clothes, become in the main un-
beautiful and ‘commerciahsed’, precisely because the maker

io6

BEAUTY

in producing them dees not consider social process, does not
scheme how to order socially their ajBFective values in accord-
ance with their use, but merely how to satisfy a demand for
them with the maximum profit to himself. This extends
finally to those products which have no other purpose than
aiffective ordering — ^paintings, films, novels, poetry, music.
Because here too their affective ordering is socially un-
conscious, because it is not realised that beauty is a social
product, there is a degradation even of these 'purest’ forms
of art products. We have commerciahsed art, which is
simply affective massage. It awakens and satisfies the
instincts without expressing and synthesising a tension
between instinct and environment. Hence wish-fulfilment
novels and films, hence jazz. The bourgeois floods the world
with art products of a baseness hitherto unimaginable.
Then, reacting against such an evident degradation of the
artist’s task, art withdraws from the market and becomes
non-social, that is personal It becomes ‘highbrow’ art, cfil-
minating in personal fantasy. The art work ends as a fetish
because it was a commodity. Both are equally signs of the
decay of bourgeois civilisation due to the contradictions in
its foundation.

The ravages of bourgeois unconsciousness destroy not
only the social product but the producer. Labour now
becomes, not labour to achieve a goal and to attain the
desirable, but labour for the market and for cash. Labour
becomes blind and unconscious. What is made, or why it is
made, is no longer understood, for the labour is merely for
cash, which now alone supports life. Thus all affective
elements are withdrawn from labour, and must therefore
reappear elsewhere. They now reappear attached to the
mythical commodity which represents the unconscious
market — cash. Cash is the music of labour in bourgeois
society. Cash achieves objective beauty. Labour in itself

J07

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

becomes increasingly distasteful and irksome, and cash
increasingly beautiful and desirable. Money becomes the
god of society. Thus the complete disintegration of a culture
on the affective side is achieved, and has resulted from the
same causes as its disintegration on the cognitive side.

Beauty, then, arises from the social ordering of the
affective elements in socially known things. It arises from
the labour process, because there must not only be agree-
ment about the nature of outer reality, but also agreement
about the nature of desire. This agreement is not static. In
the social process, outer reahty becomes increasingly
explored, and this makes the social process more far-
reaching and deeply entrenched in the environment, while
each fresh sortie into reality alters the nature of desire, so
that here, too, fresh integrations are necessary. This pres-
sure, both in science and art, appears as an individual
experience. A scientist inherits the hypotheses, and an artist
iniierits the traditions, of the past. In the scientist’s case an
experiment, and m the artist’s case a vital experience indicates
a discrepancy, a tension, whose synthesis results in a new
hypothesis or a new art work. Of course the scientist feels
the tension as an error, as something in the environment; the
artist as an urge, as something m his heart.

♦ • » • •

Science and art, as we use them in current language, are
more partial and restricted than in my use. Science, as
generally used, involves not all the cognitive elements in the
labour process but only the new elements. The scientist is on
the border line where !\ew hypotheses are generated to
modify technique. In factory, in building, in housework, and
all daily occupation, the cognitive elements are familiar and
traditional. They are technique rather than science. The
world-view is not expanding here; reahty is as our fathers

108

BEAUTY

knew it; but the scientist is situated on the very expanding
edge of the world-view. Here new regions are continually
coming into sight; discrepancies in experience continually
arise to make him modify yesterday’s formulations. The
same apphes to the artist. In daily life, in manners, desires,
morals, hopes and patriotisms we tread the daily round; we
feel as our fathers do; but the artist is continually besieged
by new feelings as yet unformulated, he continually attempts
to grasp beauties and emotions not yet known; a tension
between tradition and experience is constantly felt m his
heart. Just as the scientist is the explorer of new realms of
outer reality; the artist continually discovers new kingdoms
of the heart.

Both therefore are explorers, and necessarily therefore
share a certain loneliness. But if they are individualists, it is
not because they are non-social, but precisely because they
are performing a social task. They are non-social only in
this sense, that they are engaged in dragging into the social
world realms at present non-social and must therefore have
a foot in both worlds. They have a specially exciting task,
but a task also with disadvantages comparable to its advan-
tages. The scientist pays for his new realms by travelhng
without affective companionship, with a certain deadness
and silence in his heart. The artist explores new seas of
feeling; there is no firm ground of cognitive reahty beneath
his feet; he becomes dizzy and tormented. Those not on the
fringes of the social process get their hfe less new but more
sohd, less varied but more stable. Their values are more
earthy, more sensuous, more mature. They are rooted,
certain, and fuU. It is time for ^he antagomsm between
scientist and artist to cease; both should recognise a kinship,
as between Arctic and tropical explorers, or between
bedouins of the lonely deserts and sailors on the featureless
sea.

log

FURTEHR STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

But they must not suppose that a Ine can ever be drawn
between science and other social cognition, and art and other
social affection. The social process is far too closely woven
for that. The ingression of new values takes place at all
parts; only we call certain operations scientific or artistic
because there we see the ingression most clearly. In educa-
tion cognitive and emotional tradition is chiefly at work, but
on the one hand even here there is an ingression of the new,
and, on the other hand, the artist and the scientist are bemg
educated as well as learmng new things all their lives.

If they remember this, they will not make the mistake of
supposing they are opposite poles, between which the whole
social process is generated. This is to suppose profit pro-
duces capital. In fact profit is produced by capital, and yet
continually augments it. Science and art represent the profit
on social capital They are pushed out into the deserts of the
unknown by the very workings of society. They lead, but
ffey were instructed, they find new worlds of life, but they
were supported by the old. Always we find only terms drawn
from the labour process to be adequate to describe their
function, and only this can explain the nature of Beauty and
Truth, how man can never rest on the truth his eyes tell him
or the beauty his heart declares, but must go about finding
new truth, and cannot rest until he has created wtih his hands
a new beauty.

The artist takes bits of reality, socially known, to which
affective associations adhere, and creates a mock world,
which calls into being a new affective attitude, a new
emotional experience. New beauty is thus born as the
result of his social labouS.

But if art works are artificial, and beauty is a social pro-
duct, how do we find beauty in the natural thing, in seas,
skies, a mountain, and daffodils?

To separate in this way natural things from artificial is to

no

BEAUTY

make as dangerous -a distinction as that between environ-
mental and affective elements in the conscious field, or
between mental and material qualities. Society itself is a
part of nature, and hence all artificial products are natural.
But nature itself, as seen, is a product of society. The primi-
tive does not see seas, but the nver Oceanus; he does not see
mammals, but edible beasts. He does not see, m the night
sky, blazing worlds in the hmitless void, but a roof inlaid
with patines of bright gold. Hence all natural things are
artificial. Does that mean that we can make no distinction
between nature and art'^ On the contrary, we can clearly
distinguish two opposites, although we must recogmse their
interpenetration. In all phenomena, from hats to stars,
seasons to economic crises, tides to social revolutions, we
can distinguish varying portions of change, varying portions
of the mgression of the unhke. The most rapid evolution is
that of human society, of its customs, towns and hand-made
products. The next that of animals and plants. The
that of the solar system. The next that of our galaxy. The
whole universe in fact changes, but it changes at different
rates. The region of most change, human society, as it were,
separates itself out from a background of least change,
which we call ‘nature’ — stars, mountains and daffodils. The
hne can nowhere be precisely drawn; and in all cases it is
man, a social product, confronting nature, and finding
beauty in it. Nature finds no beauty in nature; animals do
not look at flowers or stars. Man dies, and therefore it is the
social process which has generated in him the ability to see
beauty in flowers and stars. This abihty changes m char-
acter. The sea is beautiful to a^European, to an ancient
Atheman, to a Polynesian islander, but it is not the same
beauty; it is always a beauty rooted in their cultures. The
frozen sea is to the Eskimo a different beauty from the warm
sea of the Gulf; and the blazing sun of the Equator a differ-

III

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

ent beauty from the faint six-months-dcad sun of the Arctic.

Those elements in nature which are most universal and
have changed least in the history of man, may be expected to
produce, in interaction with him, the most constant quahty.
Hence we feel rightly that there is something simple, primi-
tive, and instinctive in the beauty we see in certam primitive,
simple things. This must never be pushed too far. The
richest and most complex appreciation of natural beauty
belongs to the civilised man, not to the primitive. We may
oppose the art-work just made to the enduring mountain as
an artificial to a natural beauty, but the difference is one of
degree. In both cases beauty emerges as a quahty due to a
man, in the course of social process, gazing at a piece of his
environment. The ancient town, with weathered walls, full
of history and character, is a part of nature, and is yet a
completely artificial product; the sun lights it and the wind
weathers it. There is no dichotomy between nature and art,
only the difference between pioneers and settled inhabitants.

Art, then, conditions the instincts to the environment, and
in doing so changes the instincts. Beauty is the knowledge
of oneself as a part of other selves m a real world, and
reflects the growth in richness and complexity of their rela-
tions. Science conditions the environment to the instincts
and in doing so changes the environment. Truth is the
knowledge of the environment as a container for, and yet
known by and partly composed of, one’s own self and other
selves.

Both are products of the labour process — ^that is to say,
both are realised in action. Truth and Beauty are not the
goals of society, for directly they become goals in themselves,
they cease to exist. They are generated as aspects of the
rich and complex flow of reality. The scientist or the artist
is only a special kind of man of action he produces truth or
beauty, not as an end but as the colour of an act. Conscious-

II2

BEAUTY

ness, society, the whole world of social experience, the uni-
verse of reality, is generated by action, and by action is
meant the tension between organism and environment, as a
result of which both are changed and a new movement
begms. This dynamic subject-object relation generates all
social products — cities, ships, nations, rehgions, the cosmos,
human values.

Bourgeois culture is incapable of producing an ^Esthetics
for the same reason that most of its social products are un-
beautiful. It is disintegrating, because it refuses to recognise
the social process which is the generator of consciousness,
emotion, thought, and of all products into which emotion
and thought enter. Because ideology is rooted in the labour
process, the decay of an economy must re-appear as a
similar disintegration in the art or science which is rooted in
It. Bourgeois economic contradictions are bourgeois ideo-
logical contradictions. The scientist and artist are forced on
by the tension between past and present, tradition antw
experience. But tradition is the accumulated product of the
past labour process as preserved; and experience is an
experience in contemporary society.

Such a disintegration can only be revitalised by a trans-
formation of the relations which, at the very roots, are
destroying the creative forces of society. Change is dialectic;
one quahty gives birth to another by the revelation of the
contradictions it contains, whose very tension begets the
synthesis. The contradiction at the heart of bourgeois
culture IS becoming naked, and more and more clearly there
is revealed the inextinguishable antagonism between the two
classes of bourgeois economy, Ae bourgeoisie and the
proletariat. The ruling class, the bourgeoisie, which exploits
the labour power of the proletariat for profit, in doing so
generates an illusion which sets the pattern for all the
structure and ideology of bourgeois civihsation. Man is

^13

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

held to be free in proportion to his ignorance of the social
process, as a part of which he functions. Instead of bourg-
eois activity being governed by knowledge of the social
process, it is governed by the market, by the ‘laws of supply
and demand’, by the free circulation of cash, in short, by
mere ‘accident’, for accident is man’s name for his ignorance
of determinism. Man is held to be free by virtue of unresttict-
ed rights over property: but this merely conceals the domina-
tion of a few, who own the means of production and can
trafEck in labour-power, over the many who have nothing
but labour-power to sell. The few beheve that this donuna-
ting power they exercise makes them free, that in the act of
domination their actions are not determined; but the event —
the internal collapse of their economy in war and crisis and
of their ideology in anarchy — ^reveals that not even they
the lords are free, but their desires have disrupted their
culture.

" And who can transform it? Only those who are conscious
of the cause of its collapse, who realise that to be without
conscious social organisation is not to be free, and that
power over men by men is not freedom, even though con-
cealed, but all the more if concealed, is mere ignorance of
the necessities of society. It is precisely the proletarians
who know all this by the pressure of the economy whose
cruel weight they support. In their struggles against
exploitation they learn that only conscious organisation.
Trade Unions and factory Acts, can give them freedom from
oppression. When they see their masters, the bourgeoisie,
powerless to prevent war, unemployment, and the decay of
the economy they have tuilt up, the proletariat learns that
this power of men over men, exercised by a simple act of
the vdll and congealed in a property right, is not freedom for
either class. It is only a delusive short cut in which human-
ity was for a time lost. Freedom appears, socially, when

114.

BEAUTY

men take no short cuts of ‘will’ but learn the necessities of
their own nature and of external reahty and thus share a
goal in common. Then the common goal and the nature of
reahty uniquely determine the only possible action without
compulsion, as when two men combine, without ‘orders’,
to hft a stone that lies in their path. In such an under-
standing, a new science, a new art, and a new society are
already explicit, and to build it involves a proletanat which
has already overthrown the bourgeoisie, and in revolution
and reconstruction has transformed civihsation. In a society
which is based on co-operation not on compulsion, and
which is conscious, not ignorant of, necessity, desires as well
as cogmtions can be socially mampulated as part of the
social process. Beauty will then return again, to enter
consciously into every part of the social process. It is not
a dream that labour will no longer be ugly, and the products
of labour once again beautiful.

m

MEN AND NATURE

A Study in Bourgeois History

I N the course of our examination of bourgeois culture, we
have always reached, at a certain stage in our analysis, a
basic world-view which is the product of the bourgeois
economy and gives a characteristic shape to every form
of its ideology. It is not an error in the sense that it can be
isolated, as a separate mistake, from every department of
culture. It IS only revealed on analysis as an unseen force,
not explicit m the formulations of that culture but acting
Hxe a pressure from outside. It gives to that culture a
characteristic distortion which is not visible to those who
still live within the framework of that economy. This
bourgeois world-view is not however a fixed consciousness.
Like the society of which it is a product, it changes, and
may even appear as its own opposite— just as a photograph
has positive and negative components, and yet remains the
same partial view of reality

This world-view is the product of a society divided mto
classes, as all previous highly cultivated civihsations have
been. The essence of all class-societies is that the ruling
power IS exercised by a minority. Social process is directed
not by the necessities of the process alone — of which society
is as yet not fully conscious — but by the wills of the ruling
individuals. Thus the mdividual will appears as alone active
and creative. The aim of all society — man’s attempt to
become free of the forces of nature — seems in such societies

ii6

MEN AND NATURE

to be realised by passive obedience by the ruled to the will
of the ruler, who is guided by his individual desires. This
is how it appears to rulers and ruled, but m fact both classes
are the outcome of a division of labour and derive their
roles, not from WiU but from their status in social produc-
tion.

Such a division of the labour process, which involves a
class passively and blindly labouring and another class
directing these labours according to their consciousness of
the necessities of the case, is both an advance and a weakness
as compared with the primitive communism of the simplest
societies, in which each member labours for the tnbe without
important distinction or difference. It is an advance
because it involves a sharpening of consciousness at the
pole of the ruling class and a more intensive production of
social wealth. It is a weakness because it produces a dead-
ening of consciousness at the pole of the ruled class and a
cleavage between the conscious enjoyment of the ruliu^'
class and the blind action of the ruled class. It makes
possible a permanent mequahty of status because the ruling
class, by virtue of directing the labour of the exploited, can
also ensure the flow of the bulk of its products into their
own lives, leaving to the exploited the minimum necessary
to ensure an elRcient existence.

Thus a matenal inequality is reflected in an inequality
of consciousness. Not only does thinking become the
prerogative of the exploiting class, but it also gradually
becomes separated from action and moreover is favoured
socially to the extent to which it separates itself from action,
because it is just this separation^vhich has generated its
superior status as the mark of the ruhng, ‘cunmng’, or
admimstrative class. This separation is anti-social because
it hamstrings thought and baffles action, and yet it is pro-
duced by social forces.

117

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

The direction of their labours by the ruling class is not of
course the result of a free election by the ruled in favour of
the members of the ruling class. Were this the case they
would not be a ruling class but organs of society, hke the
look-out animal posted by a herd of herbivores. Actually,
their direction is coercive, and is enforced by the forms of
society. The class is created by a tight, a legal form of
property, which is enforced by the conscious organs of
society against the exploited class. This cannot be a nght
to an empty thing, but must be a property right in the means
of production. In all societies the means of production have
to be worked by men. In primitive societies virtually the
only means of production are men and land, there is nothing
else of economic importance, and here the nght which forms
the basis of a ruhng class is the right to own land and men.
In later civihsations it is also the right to own individually
all those means of production without which men cannot
■^xist. The right to own these, coercively enforced by society,
ensures that the owning class rules the non-owning class,
even without the right to own men.

The form of its ownership is what constitutes a class, and
the nghts of the ruhng class, visible m its laws, conventions
and religion, are also the expression of the main character-
istics of the economy. The labour process is common to all
societies; the division into exploiters and exploited is a
feature peculiar to class societies; the form this division
takes is pecuhar to each particular class society. Slave-
owning societies are divided, broadly, into free men and
slaves; feudal societies into lords and serfs; developed
bourgeois societies into capitalists and Tree’ workers, who
must bnng their labour-power to market because they are
excluded from ownership of all means of production.

The ideology of all such civihsations is that of the ruhng
class, for the division of labour into a class, functionally, of

ii8

MEN AND NATURE

thinkers and a class, functionally, of labourers causes the
aggregation of all social consciousness at the pole of the
ruhng class, as long as the division persists. Hence even
the most developed culture expresses at its height the view
of the ruhng class — its aspirations, its vicissitudes, and its
weaknesses. In a revolution, when power passes from one
class to another, a corresponding ideological revolution
takes place, though evidently this can only happen if the
conditions of the labour process have developed an antag-
onistic consciousness in the exploited class.

Thinking emerges historically as a partner to action, both
vested in the one individual. Their separation in the class
division of society begets eventually a corresponding
inefficiency of action and decay in thought, so that the
collapse of a culture is marked simultaneously by a material
dechne and an ideological bankruptcy.

The division of labour is a progressive element in social
development, and the fact that individuals genetically gifted
with ‘brains’ perform directive r 61 es and others gifted for
action perform active roles is not in itself anything but
desirable. Both thinker and actor then form part of the one
social process, and there is a unity in social action as when an
architect plans, a foreman directs, and labourers build a
house. But the consciousness of a class society does not
emerge as the consciousness of a specific labour process,
for then there would not be a class ruhng on the basis of
property right, but admimstrators or administrative organs,
thrown up by society according to the necessities of the
labour process. But this consciou^ess emerges divorced
from action or from society, as i right inherent in the
individual or in the nature of things. If this right emerged
from the necessities of the social process it would not need
formal protection; it does not so emerge and must therefore
be secured and protected by laws, by the visible forms of

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

society, which must therefore be clflss forms. The right
may come by inheritance, by being born or called to a
status which carries with it the right or by some kmd of
formal transfer between individuals. And all the forms of
society are directed to defending the right.

Hence we do not in such societies get men naturally and
by the consent of society emerging as thinkers, but con-
sciousness is estabhshed as the right of a class, which at the
best can only be painfully won by a few in other classes,
who are then sucked into the ruhng class. It is this buttress-
ing of rights which produces the characteristic distortion
in the ideology of that class, and this class ideology is, as
we have seen, also the ideology of that society’s whole
culture. All such ideologies of a ruhng class have this in
common, that they see thought, consciousness, will, (their
class prerogatives) not as determined by action or by the
outer reahty which thought goes out in action to know and
""change, but as innate — free in the sense m which they regard
themselves as free. Consciousness becomes a pnvilege
which is not actively created but which is ‘given’ by birth or
chance. This is an illusion, and cannot be pursued without
reveahng its contradictions. It is the illusion common to all
class-cultures, and therefore to all the ideologies so far
produced by history except that of dialectical materialism.

In bourgeois society the distorting effect of the illusion is
least in physics, which is consequently the first science to
emerge in that society and the last to coUapse. The distor-
tion will necessarily be greatest in the sphere of social
relations, in the scierc? of society or history, and in fact of
bourgeois history one can ask — has bourgeois history yet
been born? History as interpreted by bourgeois culture has
shown only the faintest resemblance to a scientific discipline,
and this applies most sharply to those very histonans who
regard themselves as truly scientific and objective.

120

MEN AND NATURE

Indeed, the creation of a science of history involves the
doom of bourgeois culture. It is for this reason that
bourgeois historians have so frequently arrived at the con-
clusion that history is not, and cannot be, a science. They
were correct in this measure, that history cannot be a science
within the sphere of bourgeois culture.

Capitahst economy, as it develops its contradictions,
reveals, as at opposed poles, on the one hand the organisa-
tion of labour in the factory, in the trust, in the monopoly;
on the other hand the disorgamsation of labour in the com-
petition between these units. The development of monopoly
and the increase of amalgamations by no means eases the
tension of the transition to a completely orgamsed world of
industry. Such a transition requires the extinction of capital-
ist property and the end of the exploitation of labour, but
the increasing organisation within the monopoly produces
increasing competition between the monopohes. The amal-
gamations of capitalist economy result in violent and disrup-
tive struggles on the part of profit-seekmg capital to find
elbow room for profit outside ‘stabihsed’ markets. ‘Stabihsa-
sion’ thus generates acute instability, and the nationalisation
of a market by a monopoly produces a flow of profit which,
just because the market is self-limited by monopoly, cannot
be used in it and is therefore exported to weaker markets as
a new disruptive factor. This external disorgamsation,
which is intensified by increasing internal orgamsation as
• long as it takes place within the categories of bourgeois
economy, is seen clearly to-day in the growth of economic
nationalism and Fascism, and the fy^h round of imperiahst
wars now preparing.

But just the same phenomenon is seen m bourgeois
ideology We have highly organised sciences or departments
of biology, physics, psychology, anthropology, engineering,
aesthetics, education, economics, philology, and the like, and

I2I

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

yet not only do they not form an integrated world-view, but
their very increase of internal organisation produces a dis-
organisation of culture as a whole. As the result of the
development of its constituent disciplines, bourgeois culture
is violently disrupted — the same disaster as is befalhng
capitalist economy, and due ultimately to the same cause.

The only real solution of the contradictions of capitahst
economy is of course the ehmination of the factor which
produces the external disorganisation m spite of the internal
organisation. As soon as the external disorganisation grows
faster than the internal organisation (which has been the
case since 1900), from that time bourgeois economy is
doomed, and only awaits the hand of whatever executioner
history has provided — ^in this case the proletariat. This
doom involves the complete sociahsation of production and
the realisation by society of the laws of its own functioning,
through consciousness of which it becomes able to organise
itself.

Capitalist economy has become conscious of the environ-
ment. It knows the necessities involved in making matter
obey Its will. It has done so with the illusion that this
control alone is sufficient to force nature to obey man’s will.
But the knowledge of non-human necessities is not enough
to ensure the conquest of nature. Man is a part of nature,
and it is not man in the abstract of which society is composed
but of actual men, in given times and places. The conquest
of nature is the work of these men organised in a society,
and nature only obeys ‘man’ in so far as this organisation, or
‘ civilisation’ is an accpsmplished fact, and she by no means
obeys ‘a man’, an individual, except in so far as his purpose
is a part of the purpose of organised men as a whole. This
involves co-operation. A number of individuals striving for
antagonistic ends is itself disorganisation and will result, not
in nature obeying one man’s will (for the others negate it)

iss

MEN AND NATURE

or the sum of wills (for the wills contradict each other), but
in a mean which will reflect none of their wills — such an
unwished-for result as a war or a slump.

A man does not control nature by knowing the laws
necessary to make hats, or by being free of the domain of
physics, for nature obeys not man the individual but men
organised in a society, and fulfils not any particular will but
the historic outcome of all wills in action. Therefore men
must know in addition to the necessities of ‘nature’, the
necessities of co-operation, and the historic outcome of
actions undertaken socially. This knowledge is part and
parcel of the co-operation of social action, for if it is known
that such and such actions are necessary to attain an end,
those actions must be taken. Hence such a knowledge
involves the overthrow of bourgeois economy and its
replacement by communist economy.

But bourgeois economy is not homogeneous — ^it is a class
society. Indeed that very class division is what produces its
characteristic form. There is always a class to whose
individual wills all society bends and whose individual wills
are in the sum realised in the conquest of nature, whatever
the consequences to the rest of society. This class of victori-
ous wills, the ruhng class, is one that, as capitahst economy
decays, necessarily grows more hnuted. The area of freedom
' in capitalist economy progressively contracts. But this by
no means involves the peaceful vacation by this class of their
thrones, for their possession of all social freedom, while it is
a diminishing freedom in sum, is also one which, because
the class itself is attenuated, is per ^.pita greater. Thus the
inducement to struggle to retain their power increases at the
same rate as their power as individuals over social produc-
tion increases. But at the other pole, the forces of the unfree
gather.

All this is reflected in the present state of culture. Witness-

123

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

ing Its widespread disorganisation, weask: ‘How can men’s
Knowledge of the necessities of ‘nature’, as evidenced in
biology, physics and the rest, be integrated and reconciled in
a connected world-view, and made useful to man so that it
becomes more than theoretical knowledge — knowledge
active in society?

The answer is: ‘Only by an understanding of the crucible
in which this knowledge was generated’. Is this not the
function of psychology? No, for psychology is the science
of the individual mind and all its various forms of conscious-
ness. These forms themselves are given it by its expenences,
and these are social experiences. The disorganisation of
these internally orgamsed but closed worlds of human
knowledge can only be cured by an understanding of the
very thing of which they are the product — of society. It is
not man, the individual, who produces science; the criterion
of a scientific truth is that it is objective^ that it can be tested
by other men — not by all men (lunatics and morons and
savants) but men as socially organised, and hence, through
the actions and appropriate organisation of society,
competent to test these truths. The ‘solution’ of the anarchy
of bourgeois culture is the same as for bourgeois economy,
that men become conscious of the necessities of themselves,
not as individuals or as humanity in the undifferentiated
abstract, but as men in social action — in the case of economy
as a whole, this means conscious as men actually engaged in
producing for social ends; and in the case of ideology in
particular it means conscious as men actually engaged in
studying reality for &«4al ends. But men — ^real, contem-
porary individuals — can 'only become so conscious as they
are part of the transformation of bourgeois into communist
culture, as real participants m the mfelee of the revolutionary
struggle, which transformation is itself the result of the
actions of the anti-bourgeois class, the proletariat. The

124

MEN AND NATURE

proletariat, because %of its position and organisation in
bourgeois society, is the vanguard of the fight. It seems
therefore that to understand history it is necessary to
make it, and this in fact is the case, it is a necessity in
which history is not difierent from but similar to other
sciences.

The ground plan of history as a science was laid by Marx
and Engels, and was an outcome of their own participation
in the history-making struggle of the working-class at that
time — ^the first stage m the anti-bourgeois offensive of the
proletariat. This science of Marx and Engels is historical
materialism — ^a view of the world as a umty because it is a
material world, and a view of the world as a development
because it has a history. When bourgeois culture has been
completely replaced by communist culture, as the result of a
social revolution and its aftermath of socialist construction,
then all the organised disciphnes of bourgeois culture will be
integrated in a consistent world-view. That world-view
will necessarily be historical — that is to say, it wiU be the
view of the development of men as socially organised beings,
not an arbitrary or spontaneous development, but a deter-
mined process. Psychology, biology, and physics will not be
absorbed by history, any more than factory organisation or
school orgamsation or theatre organisation will be absorbed
by social orgamsation. By the removal of the disruptive
factor, private profit, these organisations will generate the
social orgamsation and, as a result of this orgamsation,
themselves differentiate and become enriched. The renais-
sance of history will not thereforeil?the amalgamation of
the sciences, but the removal of the hidden force that was
distorting and isolating them to an increasing degree. Once
this is removed, they will commumcate, and this communica-
tion will be history. This commumcation will revitahse
them and raise them to new heights, for it is just their isola-

125

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

tion and their ignorance of their own jroots in social process
that is holding back their development.

If man has, so far, been unable to write history, it means
that all civilisation up to the present has been a part of the
prehistoric stage of society. Man’s understanding of history
in a scientific sense is shown by his capacity to make it, not
blindly but according to his will, just as his understanding of
physics IS shown by his ability to make the elements fulfil
his predictions. Thus the understanding of history is in-
volved with that very transition from the realm of necessity
to the realm of freedom which is the characteristic of the
last stage of pre-history, the emergence of the proletariat as^a
class to end classes and so inaugurate an historic civihsation.

Marx was the first who was able to show that history was
really made by men — not by man in the abstract as a develop-
ing animal, nor by outstanding men as sporadic forces, but
constantly by the whole group of individuals existing in
society. That is not to say he saw history as the story of
a group, for this is again to abstract, to lump concrete
individuals into an ideal group. It was because history was
the story of different individuals playing different parts that
the relations between them were important, and just because
they arose as the result of society’s action on matter, their
expression in art, morals, science, religion and law were real
factors in the history of society. It was because Marx saw
that history was the story of all individuals that he saw it
must be the science of organised society, for only in organisa-
tion do individuals acquire a meaning; it is only by virtue of
the warp and woof «^manifold relations engendered by
social relations, which intersect in nodes, that the nodes or'
individuals are individualised and become more than
specimens of a species.

What is history? It is the story of men. But men may be
considered as lumps of matter, and as such they perform in

126

MEN AND NATURE

the course of tune certain movements. This is not the subject
of history, but of physics. History is interested in those
quahtative innovations of mankind which differentiate it
from ‘nature’ — from dead matter and ammals. History is
the law of motion of men, not as matter or as hvmg breath-
ing organisms or as animals, but as something distinct from
all these spheres, as socially organised animals.

History then only begms where physics, physiology and
biology leave off. The laws of physics pervade all spheres,
but physiology and biology have also new laws. The laws of
physiology in turn are valid in biology which, however, is the
domain of qualitatively new laws. History only starts when
fresh laws, mclusive of but additional to physical, physio-
logical and biological laws begin to operate, and the evolu-
tion and change of these laws is the subject of history. It is
only in this sphere that we can begin to speak of history.
But what is it that distinguishes man, in all stages of human-
ity, from the beasts'^ Marx had only to ask and answer this
question, to uncover the whole sphere of laws appropriate
to history.

History has this pecuharity additional to other sciences
that, as It were, it forces man to bend round and look
himself in the eyes.

Havmg proceeded through physics, physiology and
•biology to history, he finds as part of history, the production
of these very sciences, which it thus transcends. The ideo-
logical circle is then closed, but only wjien it has included as
material factors, as things hnked together causally at each
stage, every sphere of human activi^ And the closure is
only spatial — ^for history is what men mike and men con-
tinue to hve, and history, and all the ideologies of whose
genesis it is the record, continue to unfold. It unfolds in the
present, in our action as we hve and move in the real society
of to-day. Closed ideologically, the circle is open in action

127

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

With which it is therefore unified. History leads from and
through action to man’s mind.

But the last thing the bourgeois wishes to do is to look
himself in the eyes.

Marx’s answer to the question, What is it that differenti-
ates man from the animals? is this, that man is orgamsed
and organised in a social way: there is no such thing as lone
man, but only real hving men, and not merely men clumped
hke swannmg locusts, but arranged in social relations
ansing out of economic production. The co-operation
necessary to production makes them umte, and makes them
men.

But (it may be said) the bees, ants and wasps unite for
economic production, and this does not make them human.
True, and what is the biological difference between the
social insects and man? With them, this organisa,tion is
instinctive, bees and wasps in any situation will reproduce it.
But men will not reproduce their society instinctively.
European culture and capitalism are not instinctive. Men,
turned as babes into a jungle, would wander through it as
mere brutes, without individuahty or consciousness, feral
and dumb.

This proves that man’s behaviour, ideas, art, science, laws,
ethics, technique are not in him, in his genetic make-up. In
his genetic make-up is only plasticity, the potentiahty of this
or a thousand other shapes. These things must therefore all
be outside him and imprinted on him, not as a stereotype
prints a drawing, mechanically, but rather as a body cell, by
being in a certain pajs^pf the embryo and in a certain relation
to other parts, becomes a bone, fat, or epidermal cell, and
yet if transplanted will change its nature according to its
new situation.

What is there then, outside man the unit, which has this
effect on him? Simply the relations into which he enters with

128

MEN AND NATURE

Other men, not wilhngty but because he is born into such a
society, just as its relations with other cells afifect the body
cell, not voluntarily but because it is in such a place. Thus all
the social relations expressed in all the possible interactions
between man and man become, with Marx’s interpretation,
not somethmg superadded to humanity or ‘put into practice’
by man, but something which makes the concrete man what
he IS. But, being so made, he makes other men diiSferent,
stiU through these same real channels. Thus there is a real
meaning to the defimtion of man as orgamsed men, which
separates it from the apparent orgamsation of the hive. The
organisation is more than the individual men and cannot be
predicted from the bare babe, because it has a law of growth
of its own, occupying ©ons; but still it is an organisation of
men. It is not an environment. The organisation of, for
example, moths swarming round a flame or beasts round a
salt lick is environmental; the organisation of bees m a hive
is innate. But the orgamsation of men, which produces the
very phenomena which history is to study, is neither, it is
social.

History thus becomes, not the study of individuals, of
their innate capacities and responsive changes to stimuli
(for that is psychology) nor the study of the influence of the
environment on men (for that is ecology) but it is the study
of this organisation which is neither innate nor given m the
environment, and which although it is the organisation of
men in nature has a law of development neither human nor
natural but economic. Now it is certain that bourgeois
culture could not analyse this organis^tSbn, for it is just this
organisation which bourgeois economy, as its pre-requisite,
denies and veils in every possible way. Bourgeois culture is
constantly proclaiming man the individual against this
orgamsation, and is continually involving itself in contradic-
tion, for all the qualities it calls ‘individual’, so far from

E ^29

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

mental* So, it is true, are the organic adaptations to the
water of the otter or the whale.

But whereas such organic adaptations are adaptations of
the individual to the environment, those of men are adapta-
tions of the social relations of a body of men to the environ-
ment. The otter is adapted to the water through his innate
corporeal transformations. Man is still better adapted to
the water, but only through society, because society has
built ships, created ports, developed navigation, and can so
master the water. Man’s adaptations are not to the water,
but to society, which only as a whole^ as an organised co-
operative system, is adapted to the water. Man’s speech,
physical knowledge and civic pride are not directly adapted
to the water, they are adapted to an organised society, and
only in organised society is there a human adaptation to
water. When we say environmentalised man^^ we mean
therefore men with an organisation produced among them
by the necessities of the environment, and not men with
individual changes hke the otter’s flat tail, produced m them
by the environment. But since men are organised and are
the umts of the organisation, they are changed by it. They
are not as units changed (hke the otter) by the environment;
they are changed as units by the organisation in which they
participate to face the environment. They do not, as bare
men and units, face the environment: as such units they face
only organised society, into which they are born. What is
this organisation? It is the organisation into which men are
forced when as a body they work together to change the
environment. Tt organisation imposed by economic
production which generates the non-instinctive and char-
actenstically human quahties.

The same organisation is also reflected in the humanised
environment. The environment too is changed, not merely
by the movement of material (cities, roads, port, ships,

132

MEN AND NATURE

machinery, cultivatedr plants, agriculture, clearings), but
also because this very process, by reveahng the structure of
reahty more clearly, makes the environment different for
man. The cosmos of our culture is a different environment
from the cosmos of Egyptian man; and equally men, by
being changed, become different for the environment and
different for each other. The man of modern psychology and
physiology is not the man of the Australian corroboree; the
cosmos-for-the-blackfellow is not the cosmos-for-us.

Thus what we call orgamsation is the outcome of one
double process — the environmentalisation of organised
men, begetting all the human values — language, science, art,
religion, consciousness; and the humamsation of nature,
begetting the material changes m nature and man’s own
greater understanding of reahty. Thus the development of
humanity is not the increasing separation of man from a
‘state of nature’. It is man’s increasing interpenetration with
nature. History is not, as the bourgeois supposes, the story
of man in himself, or of human ‘nature’ (which changes too
little to be the subject of history) but the story of this increas-
ing interpenetration of nature by man as a result of his
struggle with it. It is the story of economic production.
The story of man is not the story of the increasing subjection
of man’s freedom and individuality to organisation in order
to cope with nature, but his growth of freedom and indi-
viduahty through organisation imposed by nature, in his
interaction with it. The impossibihty of ever finding human
values or material causes separate in historjJ^ue to this
very fact, that history is the study of tSeir increasing inter-
penetration and of the nch development of this inseparable
network of relations. History is the study of the object-
subject relation of men-nature, and not of either separately.
It is the study of the products of men acting on nature and
being acted on by it. Nature never finds itself faced by

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

individual men, but always by men wprking co-operatively in
economic production; and man never finds himself faced by
nature directly, but always by society organised by nature.

Thus, as a result of economic production a man finds
himself born not into nature, but into a society already
organised by interpenetration with nature, and into a nature
already changed and X-rayed by this. He does not ever at
any stage consciously form a society; society forms him. He
in turn, as a result, is an active centre for a fresh transforma-
tion; he in turn forms society. Thus social development
proceeds, and this is history.

History occurs not only on the human side, for, though
society changes nature, nature so changed imposes fresh
forms of organisation on society.

Which comes first then in time, the individual man or
society? Did not individual men ever find themselves with-
out society and, having regard to the necessities of the case,
consciously enter into social co-operation? No, society
came first, for it would have been sub-human anthropoids,
unconsciously and bhndly forced to enter into some rude
forms of economic production unknown to other animals,
which were by this very activity forced to become men.

Versions of History

It was Marx who first laid bare then the subject of history,
which was not till then distinguished and is to-day still not
distinguis hed ^ hin the categories of bourgeois culture. He
first showed that aj?!ften’s activities are the subject of history
and must be included m it. He showed that not merely
‘great men’ working along special channels, ‘important ideas’
or special occasions — ‘times of ferment’ — ^produce the
motion of civilisation; but every man, in the active relations
he enters into with other men, has a causal role in deter-

m

MEN AND NATURE

mining the movements^ of history. Such a notion had before
only been conceived under the false notion of a whole people
passively and sohdly providing the background of history,
while great men, great occasions, and great cultures acted as
accidental disturbances or inflammations of this passive
lump. Marx’s analysis of social relations was evolutionary
and therefore revolutionary: it was from the activity of the
people themselves, as a causal result, that great men, great
occasions, and great cultures emerged, and in turn developed
an internal law of piotion.

Bourgeois culture, which set itself at its best period the
task of understanding everythmg around it, has certainly
attempted a causal scheme of history. It was doomed to fail
in this attempt for the same reason as bourgeois philosophy
was doomed to fail, because it seized hold first of the object
as distinct from the subject, and then, forced by the logic of
reality to seize the subject, it found itself in an equally un-
tenable position. Subject and object, although opposite
poles, interpenetrate. In the individual this interpenetration
is sensation. In men this interpenetration is history. It is an
active interpenetration, and m proportion as bourgeois cul-
ture becomes the culture of a class whose role is conscious-
ness, and which is divorced from the exploited class whose
task is action, there occurs the separating out of the two
elements of sensation. Then both history and epistemology
disintegrate.

The first causal scheme of history which bourgeois culture
gave birth to was the environmental or me taphysical-
materialist explanation, according to"%mich man’s social
history is the result of his environment. A hot climate
produces black races. Where there is coal, there wiU sprmg
up an industrial culture. In the cold zones man is necessarily
a hunter. On rivers and by the sea he is a navigator or fisher.
Fertile zones support dense populations and make possible

135

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

town bfe. Regular floods ensure the creation of a settled
agriculture.

Now this explanation, in spite of its power, ultimately has
fatal weaknesses. It ignores the active creative role of man,
and envisages him as passively moulded by the environment;
this obviously cannot be the case.

For example, coal exists in many parts of the v/orld‘ but
only in a certain place and in a certain time did it give rise to
industnal predominance. In other places cultural develop-
ment was buEt up on water power. There are thousands of
islands in the world: on some the inhabitants have no boats;
on others, craft ranging from coracles and bladders to ocean-
going hners. TTie ancient Britons hved over coal-seams, but
for them the coal did not exist, and could not therefore
determine then existence.

This reveals the ‘hole’ in the mechanical-materialist inter-
pretation. The conditioning resources of Nature only exist,
as determinants, insofar as from being things-in-themselves
they become things-for-us. Coal did not exist for the ancient
Briton because he had no technique for extracting it. The
technique depends on a certain social organisation, when the
necessary division of labour (capitalist mining) exists to make
coal a determining social factor. Similarly, air only exists
as an important transport medium for a race which has the
necessary technique and social organisation to fly, and water
only exists as a means of navigation for races able to build
boats, the size and complexity of their boats in turn depend-
ing on thei r stat e of economic development.

Thus anyscH5k?«hich makes the matenal configuration
of the environment the determining factor in civilisation fails
because it does not see that the environment is not some-
thing fixed. As environment, its very qualities depend on the
subject, man, and primarily on his social orgamsation. It
becomes an environment mineable in places only when

136

MEN AND NATURE

technique and social organisation make mining possible.
It becomes an environinent which can be tilled and wall pro-
duce crops in places, only when social organisation has
advanced to a stage where culture is possible. It becomes an
environment which can be navigated in places only when
social orgamsation makes possible the building and sailing
of ships.

Thus, although the environment in the form of rivers,
iron, coal and air contains determming factors for society
at each stage of its evolution, which factors prove determin-
ant depends upon the technical and social orgamsation of
man at that stage, in brief, on his economic production.
The environment as environment is changed by economic
prdduction, not merely in its reahty but in its potentiahty.
Thus the causal role m history cannot be played by the
environment as an active matrix for passive society, for
society itself selects at each stage, not arbitrarily but as a
result of precedent evolution, which are to be the determin-
ing factors in the environment.

On the reahsation of this the explanation of history by
environment breaks down, for after stripping from society
all quahties not purely environmental, nothing recogmsably
human is left. It does not follow that the environment plays
no part in determimng history. On the contrary, at every
stage the environment-for-man is determinant. But the
environment-for-man changes at every stage, and its change
must therefore be sought in society.

This leads to the ideahstic interpretation of history, in
which history is made by man’s desi^r'rf:^^ and aims.
But this theory is wrecked on the opposite difficulty to that
of the mechamcal-materiahst explanation. The latter is
unable to explain the change of the environment, the former
is unable to explain the constancy of man— by constancy,
we mean his constancy as bare individual. If a Melanesian,

E* ^37

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

an ancient Athenian and a modern English babe were
allowed to grow up in a wood, or fofthat matter a deserted
town or factory, none would show any of the characteristics
of its parents’ culture — either their language, their econ-
omic production, or their consciousness. They would grow
up sub-human. This shows that man remains through the
ages relatively unchanged, or that at least his genetic change
IS m no way proportioned to his change as a member of
contemporary society. This raises the dilemma, how can the
unchanging genotype, acting on the environment, beget the
change we have discussed? The answer can only be that it is
a change, not m individual man but in his association — ^in
that interpenetration of man with nature which is neither
man alone nor bare nature, but is a system of economic pro-
duction, including on the one hand machines, plant, capital
and cities, and on the other hand the social relations, science,
art, law and culture which have been generated by this
system. This system, although it is composed of umts and
of environment, has a history and a law of motion to to be
found in the analysis of the umt or the environment
separately.

Thus it is that bare man, born into this system, becomes
moulded by it and so changed in turn operates through the
system on the environment and brings about further changes
which are the basis of a new departure.

Ideas themselves can only be the product of such an
existing organisation. Napoleon, Caesar or Plato gets his
language, the things he sees, his assumptions and desires,
from engag!=g»ia..§Qgal life, from being educated and living
in a Greek city or Rome or Repubhcan France.

That is not to say that ideas are a mere iridescence. On
the contrary, it is precisely in Marxism that ideas become
real things, being both caused and in turn creating an effect.
Darwin’s consciousness, being formed, undergoes its own

138

MEN AND NATURE

law of development a|id produces changes in the system in
which he lives. Just as the environment, with indefinite
potentiahties-m-itself, reveals successively new, definite
potentialities for man as a result of the evolution of tech-
nique, so bare man, with indefimte possibihties of conscious-
ness, reveals a consciousness appropriate to the system in
which he finds himself, either Melanesian or Atheman.
Man’s consciousness then is a real determining factor m
history, but it is not man’s consciousness that produces at
each stage social orgamsation for economic production, but
social orgamsation for economic production which pro-
duces man’s consciousness. Bemg is prior to thinking, and
we can easily see that this must be so, for aU hvmg organisms
engage in activity which is not conscious activity, and this
unconscious activity is phylogenetically and ontogenetically
prior to conscious activity. Thus in the human body the
sympathetic system acts unconsciously and is prior to and
more fundamental than the more highly organised conscious
activities. It is just because consciousness is subtle and
richer, that it is sequent to unconsciousness.

No analysis of society which aims to be really causal can
take consciousness as prior, and wnte history in terms of
man’s desires and ideas. True, history is made partly by the
conscious actions of men, and any causal explanation must
include consciousness; but it must include consciousness as
It develops historically, as an outcome of the development of
economic production and the division of labour.

And although men’s history-making actiggf are con-
scious and willed, the results by no iiloans tally with the
aims, but are in fact often quite other. Indeed this is the
chief characteristic of the prehistoric stage of civilisation.
How then can ideas play a causal role, in the sense that
history is their reahsation, when events contradict men’s
intentions? Only if, opposing the intentions, there is a kind

^39

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

of devil or evil force, and this ceases to be a causal

f

explanation. If we take as primary the interpenetration of
man with nature, of which ideas are the most refined
product, we are then in a position to explain both the
disasters and the successes of ideas, and to understand
why men will and act as they do, and why their
volition and actions produce the results we know.
Living precedes ideas; and men must breathe and be
fed to have them.

Because of the failure of the theory of consciousness as
the causal explanation of history, an attempt was made by
later ideahsts to make the cause of history, not ideas in the
heads of men (conscious purposes) but ideas absolute and
out of the heads of men. Certainly these absolute ideas
outside the heads of men need no sustenance nor determining
cause, but just because of that they furnish no causal
explanation of history. Of these explanations by absolute
ideas (fixed ‘cycles of decay’; reahsations of ‘Hellenic and
Faustian cultures’) the best known and most consistent is
Hegel’s. Such an explanation is faced with the dilemma of
admitting, either that these absolute ideas now exist really
and that therefore evolution is at an end, or do not really
exist, m which case causation is explained as the work of
non-existents, and this is easily seen for the logical trick it is.
Again, if these absolute ideas are real existents now, either
in the past the absolute ideas existed or were later generated
by the process of history. If the former, then how can reality
and the ideas be in mutually-determining relation; if the
latter, how “iP'liimdeas be the cause of that which has
generated them?

In Spengler’s crude form, or m the absurd form given it
by Fisher (who explains bourgeois civilisation as the evolu-
tion of ‘the ideal of liberty’) absolute idealism shows itself
even less adequate than vdth Hegel, and, as compared with

140

MEN AND NATURE

mechanical-materialism, is a mark of the increasing poverty
of bourgeois thought/

Obviously the environmental ‘explanation’ of history
corresponds to mechanical-matenahsm in bourgeois phil-
osophy, with neo-Darwmism m biology, and with behaviour-
ism in psychology. Similarly the purposive ‘explanation’
corresponds to idealism m philosophy, neo-Lamarckiamsm
in biology, and the instinct and hormic schools m psychology.

As these explanations by their own development expose
then* bankruptcy, there is regression to a kind of history
which is beheved to be a compromise, or synthesis, but
which is in fact nothing but a confession of the breakdown of
the culture producing it. This sytem has as its expression in
philosophy, positivism or phenomenahsm, but it is con-
stantly being forced by its own contradictions into a con-
fused eclecticism. How does this positivism appear in
bourgeois history?

Positivism asserts that man’s sole concern is with sensa, or
phenomena. Smce subject and object are, accordmg to
positivism, ahke inaccessible (for the object is an unknow-
able thmg-m-itself) sensa are the sole data of science and no
true statements as to reality are possible. Laws are merely
convenient summaries or lucky predictive accidents. Since
the object is declared unknowable, the real ground of
causahty — the material basis of sensation — is eliminated.
The world no longer possesses a unity due to its materiality,
and sensa are connected in no causal way: anything might
happen.

Of course such an attitude is a negatr«>ii'^*^ence and in
its pure form is hardly practicable. The subject or the object
is in fact smuggled in illegitimately by some backdoor. For
example, laws become convement statements (Mach), or the
world becomes the work of a mathematician (Jeans). In this
way a spurious unity is given to some restricted field of

14.1

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

reality. A collection of such spurious unities not themselves
unified, a farrago of mutually contradictory categories,
becomes the content of science when any large domain of
reality is surveyed. Thus positivism necessarily involves
eclecticism.

This is visible in bourgeois history in two forms. First of
all there is the monstrously detailed collection of facts, of
inscriptions, pipe roUs, potsherds, and records of every
description which become valued simply for their own sake,
as if a sufficient accumulation of them would eventually in
some mysterious way give birth to a history. This would be
a correct assumption if such detail work were part of an
ordered programme, had a method, or were carried out at
the impulse of a general science of history with understood
laws and a causal programme. Instead, if is like a curiosity
shop; it is the collectmg of detail for its own sake, and since
the domain of history is all men's activities, the jackdaw
accumulation of such facts can proceed indefinitely until not
all the volumes of mankind could hold the records. No
science of history, however, would have been produced even
then, for it is the function of science to control and direct the
collection of such facts now and, in this control and direc-
tion, to receive confirmation, negation or transformation.
Such an accumulation, as long as it remains fundamentally
unscientific, only adds to the confusion.

Men’s opimons of events, however resurrected and
authentic, do not form history, for we do not learn the
characteristics of an epoch by learmng the opinions of its
members coB8Si*ks#it, any more than we learn the character
of a man by his opimon of himself. We do not learn the
laws of history’s movement from the intentions of its units,
for events, though produced by the conscious actions of
men, do not realise their hopes. We learn these laws, as
we learn those of the physiology of bodies and the evolution

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MEN AND NATURE

of animals, by the objective study of what exists independent
of consciousness, in the course of a development in which
theory marches step by step with pjactice, and the observed
fact at every stage must transform the theory. If no general
theory applymg to all men’s activities exists, how can even
the most minute study of the records of dead men’s activities
be of value?

History is an evolution, a change; and we can no more
expect to derive the real pressure and being of a civilisation
from its language and material surroundmgs at any stage
than we could expect naked man, put mto a deserted London,
to become a modem Londoner. All social quahties derive
from society in movement, inheriting capital and transform-
ing it, and we cannot understand the congealed products of
each stage — ^its records — ^without understanding the meta-
bohsm of the society that produced them. We might as soon
attempt to recreate the appearance and habit of the fossil
animal from his bones without a study of livmg organisms
to-day.

The staggering accumulation of unrelated petty detail
which IS bourgeois history to-day, naturally produces
attempts at organisation. These contradict the basic positiv-
ism of the approach, and have to be smuggled in illegiti-
mately. These attempts are necessarily restricted to limited
fields: one historian will explain Egyptian history as the pro-
duct of Nilotic conditions; another will explain the decline of
Greece in terms of malaria, a third will explain bourgeois
history as the growth of the idea of hbert^ a fourth will
explain medieval history as the triumplf^Tlhristo-Roman
conceptions of order, a fifth will explain the development of
the human race as a result of mineral deficiency; a sixth will
explain the diffusion of heliolithic culture by the attraction
of gold deposits; a seventh will explain the growth of
capitalist economy by the bringing back of bulhon from

^43

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

South Amenca, and so on, endlessly. Faced with the task of
explaining the whole domain of culture, the historian has no
hesitation in combining Freudian, behaviouristic, diffusion-
istic, pathological, ideahstic and matenahstic explanations,
even though their premises are mutually contradictory. How
can such a mixture call itself history, if by history is under-
stood any causal or scientific account of men’s activities in
Time?

But history, as a science, is history in the present. It is
science separating the past as preserved in the present. No
one can cognise the past directly. But this separation of the
past from the present is m fact the function of aU sciences,
for in so far as the umverse has a history, aU sciences have as
their task the understanding of how things come into being
and are at each stage determined by their past. Thus, just
as the foundation of biology is evolution and metabohsm, so
the foundation of physics is cosmogony and motion. Yet
this study of the past of the domain of qualities proper to the
science in question has one main end, that of discovering
the law of motion of all quahties comprised in it, their pas-
sage from not-being into being and back again.

This law of motion is discovered with a purpose; for just
as the discovery through cosmogony of the most universal
laws of physics, and, through paleontology, of the most
umversal laws of hfe, taught men the structure of physics-
now and life-now, so the discovery through history of the
most universal laws of society, teaches men the structure of
society-now. But it does not rest there. There is passage
not only to tlie pMffrom the present but back again. Thus
our knowledge of physiology and embryology is denved
from paleontology, but then, equipped with knowledge
denved from physiology, we turn with fresh understanding
to those rehcs of the past which were the starting point of
our researches. It is not a mere dialectic movement of theory.

144

MEN AND NATURE

The theory develops becausciat each stage it issues in active
expenment and predil^tion: biology develops in experiments
with orgamsms, in predictions of where and for what to
look among fossils or evolutionary survivals; biology grows.
Physics develops in experiments with bridges and engines,
in predictions of what to look for m the field of space. Thus
a science is always this separation out from the present
of the past which, having being conserved m the
present is different, and begets a dialectic antagonism which
generates the future. This is merely the reflection in theory
of vihat happens in reality, where the past is also preserved,
by the conservation laws, in the present, and by a kmd of
polar tension produces the new.

But the two processes, the theoretical and the objective,
do not run on "in parallel’. They intermingle, for the
theoretical is the reflex of the objective and at every stage is
seen to be the result of a matenal movement. Theory is
always transformed as the result of a practical, objective
transaction. History therefore appears as the most vital of
the sciences m this respect, that it is the study of the very
movement of society which generates the other sciences and
itself.

Thus history too cannot escape from the method and life
of all other sciences, which is to separate the past from the
present in the only way in which it can be separated, as a
contradiction, as a negation, which is synthesised in the
future. The past to history is all that is-not-here, all that is
not-in-the-present, and yet we in the present are studying it
now in the present; but because, hithertO'^^TIiconscious of this
past, we now become conscious of it, we are not what we
were, we are changed, something new has come to be. The
present is now something new, it is the future. All this is not
theoretical; it takes place both in action and thought. That
is what we mean when we say, ‘The separation, as a nega-

^45

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

tion, of the past from the present, begets the negation of the
negation, the “past as seen by the present”, which is the
future’.

The process is not contemplative, it is active. The change
can only be a real change if new consciousness is not a mere
iridescence, but a real entity, determimng and determined.
In fact consciousness, in its full active realisation, is just such
a real determimng entity. New consciousness (new know-
ledge, theory, or hypothesis) can only come into being as the
result of an action, an experiment, a contact with reality
which negates existmg consciousness and as the result of this
tension produces new consciousness — a new theory, hypo-
thesis, or system of knowledge. This is the method of indi-
vidual sensation, but when deahng with categories of
sensation socially vahd and generally organised, it becomes
the method of science.

It must equally be the method of history. History cannot
seize hold of the past by a divine ingestion; it can only seize
hold of the present in the past. It cannot extract a theory
from the present by an undetermined, one-way contempla-
tion; it can only do so by testing at each stage its historical
theones in practice. Its historical theones are precisely its
conscious formulations of man’s destiny, purpose, and role.
History is an analysis of aU the statements about man that
are made in his laws, his ethics, his art, his religion, his
science, and his hopes, and it puts this analysis into practice
by living according to them or alternatively by denying them
and transforming them. Hence the science of history is part
of the practicallifetivity of living according to the social
consciousness of an age or alternatively of rebelling against
it and transforming it. Indeed this must be so, for if history
deals with all man’s activities — ^his hates, loves and hopes as
wen as his building and feeding — ^it cannot be separated
from his loving, hating, building and feeding now: if history

146

MEN AND NATURE

is the theory of how he did these in the past, it cannot
neglect the theory of^how he does these in the present, and
since science at every stage passes over into practice, it
cannot neglect to undertake the confirmation or transforma-
tion of these activities now,

^ * m

This IS not merely the method of sensation and science, it
is the general method of man’s hvmg. Thus, when men
begin to question in any age the contemporary theory of
social relations embodied in their art, their science, their
laws, their morahty, their system of social distribution,
status, and rights, then it is a sign that their practical experi-
ence has proved the defects, or ‘errors’, in the ideological
system as a whole or in part; but it is also a sign that, given
in the very facts of their expenence which expose the falsity
of this superstructure, is the outhne of the new superstruc-
ture which will more adequately express their real concrete
being. The transformation accomphshed, being and think-
ing are both on a new level, are both transformed by the
interaction and ready for a new development.

This then explams the evolution of society. The primary
factor IS concrete being, the actual production in which men
engage more or less consciously and willingly but which,
considered as a whole, is unconscious. This is the evolution
of technique — associated men changing nature as step by
step the necessities of nature progressively unfold in re-
ciprocal contact with techmque, so that each reflects the
other and yet both change for each otheC This is the mas-
sive basis of society, and just as man may only eat, or eat and
think, but cannot only think, so this developing technique
with all the division of labour and the sharpening differentia-
tion and increasing complexity it produces, is not all consci-
ous and in any case is never conscious in one head, but is

H7

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

accompanied on the one hand by ple^a of unrelated desires,
hopes and thoughts in individual heaas which are born and
die, and, on the other hand by shared desires, hopes and
thoughts which endure in the form of language, scientific
disciphnes, art products, traditions, conventions, laws and
morahties. The throwing up of these secondary products
exerts in turn a final influence on the whole, but there is
never any doubt as to which is pnor.

Because laws, sciences, languages, arts, distribution
systems, morahties and all the social relations and status
arrangements connected therewith, are as it were the most
generalised, the most social, the most recent, and the furthest
removed from nature of all economic products, they form
the superstructure or most abstract portion of history. They
form the theory of human life, the consciousness of society,
the visible flower of activity; but they grow from, are
nourished by, and are a new aspect of living, breathing,
working, active men. If men in the course of their interaction
with nature, hving practically as men m nature and in
society, are faced with an objective fact that contradicts this
social theory of life, a tension is generated which will ulti-
mately bring about the appropriate modification of the
superstructure. Moreover, because it is a social or shared
superstructure, only those facts will bring about its modifica-
tion which are capable of being made social facts, facts
connected with man’s relation as associated man to outer
reahty. We may say if we hke that minor transformations of
technique ultimately affect the whole superstructure. Or we
may say with more detail that when associated men immedi-
ately in interaction with nature discover discrepancies
between theory and practice, immediate detailed theory is
modified accordingly — (‘technological improvement’) — and
as the minor discrepancies accumulate, theories more and
more general or ‘social’ in scope are affected, until ultimately

148

MEN AND NATURE

the whole superstructure is modified — ‘ideolo^cal develop-
menf. \

This IS the evolutionary theory of society, which holds
good for all society that has any consciousness and is at
grips with nature; but the two are the same — conscious man
is socially productive man. This theory is therefore the
basic theory of human society. It is the fundamental law of
motion of history, and applies to all men’s theories and to all
men’s activities. Necessarily, because it is a scientific theory,
it sees history as still bemg made now and aU men’s con-
temporary theories and activities as part of the science of
history. History can only find the theoretical past m the
theoretical present and can only develop the theoretical
present by being active, and so producing the real future.

In the history of evolution, Marx also discovered revolu-
tion. He found, as a well-known objective fact, that mstead
of the superstructure being always gradually, by small
increments, remodelled by men’s daily activity, there were
penods when the whole superstructure, as if with explosive
force, was rapidly shattered and transformed. Laws,
sciences, arts, rights, distribution systems — all were involved
m one stupendous explosion, lasting for one or two cen-
turies, hke the slow motion film of a bursting bomb.

Now this could only mean one thing, that for some reason
an insulating gap had opened between the superstructure
(theory) and the basis (practice) so that practice could not
continually modify theory. As a result the antagonism had
grown and the tension had at last become so terrific that the
resultant explosion had shattered almost ’every portion of
the old superstructure. An obvious example was the
bourgeois revolution which inaugurated the ‘modern era’.

But why (Marx asked) should revolutions be? Why
should the superstructure show this rigidity, and permit an
explosive antagomsrn to be generated m society?

H9

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

Marx’s answer was one of the most revelatory hypotheses
ever framed. The antagonism is itself only a reflection in the
ideological sphere of a fundamental division in production, and
this division is expressed, in the sphere of social relations, by
antagonistic classes, of which one class is the conscious,
contemplative, directing, and therefore ruling class and the
other is the unconscious active, directed and ruled class.
Therefore the antagonism between conscious superstructure
and active technique is an antagonism which reflects the
division of society’s economic production. One class directs
economic production consciously and by so doing is able to
direct the flow of the bulk of society’s economic products
into its life. The other class is directed and exploited. The
directive, conscious class is the class that produces the
consciousness of society: the superstructure is the product of
the exploiting class.

But the exploited class is the class that performs the actual
labour; it is the class which is directly at grips with nature;
it IS the class which handles the productive forces of society.
The ruhng class only came into being because its members
performed a socially useful function, by directing labour they
increased the productive efiiciency of society as a whole.
The first stages of such a class society are therefore an
increase m productive forces because of the new class struc-
ture. The society flourishes.

But as the society develops the class antagonism develops.
There is a growing division between thinking and acting,
between the exploiters and exploited. Theory flies apart
from practice; the ruling class become less functional, and
more parasitic, contemplative and idealistic, and the ex-
ploited class more and more become the sole controllers of
the productive forces of society at the same time as they
become more and more divorced from its products. The
productive forces as they develop mdicate the increasing

150

MEN AND NATURE

tectuiical power of man and Ms mcreasing practical ex-
perience of reality, b|it since the productive forces are the
domain of the exploited, and the theory or superstructure is
the creation of the exploiting class, there is only generated a
growing antagomsm between theory and practice, evident in
an increasing divorce of man’s professions from reahty, and
of the outward forms of society from its true content. There
is an increase in exploitation, in the parasitical role of the
exploitmg class, and a growing contradiction between what
man could do and what he is actually doing. Man thinks
fine tMngs and does hateful ones. He is ‘sinful’, base, and
degenerate, at the very time when Ms notions are most Mgh-
falutin.

This antagomsm cannot but continue to develop, for
every growth in productive forces exposes the faults of the
superstructure and, at the same time, makes the non-
productive class chng more closely to it. The superstructure
now becomes transformed through the necessities of main-
taming the class division wMch begot it, and it becomes
transformed into a class-fortress and base for reaction,
counter-revolution and Fascism — ^thus adding to the bitter-
ness of the struggle. Revolution occurs when the exploited
class, operatmg the productive forces of society, revolts and
shatters the whole superstructure that cnppled it.

TMs revolt is not a blind shattering. The exploited class,
in control of the productive forces, has by its very develop-
ment of those forces learned the new techmque wMch
negates the superstructure of the exploiting class. Because
theory and practice have got into antagomstic hands, each
development of productive forces could not transform the
superstructure in an evolutionary manner, but these develop-
ments accumulated until they attained explosive force.
Thus, by the time a revolutionary situation has matured,
there is a whole new superstructure latent in the exploited

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

class, arising from all they have learned from the develop-
ment of productive forces, and thisjbecomes the starting
point for the superstructure of the new society, which there-
fore is one which starts on a higher plane than that of the
overthrown society This is the creative rdle of revolutions.
It IS shown clearly in the bourgeois revolution, where the
exploited class of the towns, the bourgeoisie, because of the
development as productive forces of bourgeois private
property, overthrew the feudal regime with its superstructure
based on status or degree, and estabhshed one based on
private property.

The proletanan revolution is a consequence of the in-
creasing antagonism between bourgeois superstructure and
proletarian labour, and when the cripphng by the super-
structure of the productive forces — ^visible in slumps,
poverty, war and unemployment — grows unbearable, not
only does the proletariat revolt but the very technical
developments which mcreased its productivity — social
organisation of production inside the unit — also generates
the ideology which transforms the capitahst superstructure.
The proletarian superstructure is, long before the revolution
in Russia, already extant in embryo in the form of Marxism
or scientific socialism, and this is in turn the product of the
analysis by Marx of capitahst production. In this analysis of
the past history of society m contempora.ry capitahsm, he
saw the new productive forces made possible by the prole-
tariamsation of labour, and only realisable in communism.

Thus Marx was able to answer the question as to why the
superstructure becomes detached from the foundations, and
society is rent in twain. It is the result of a class cleavage.
He was able to show that these classes themselves only arose
as a development of special forms of production — ^the slave
with agricultural production, the bourgeois with feudal pro-
duction, and the proletanan with capitahst production; and

15^

MEN AND NATURE

he was able also to show how the transformation of the
superstructure, the ac|:ompaniment of revolution, was not
an arbitrary shattering, but the realisation in new social
relations of possibihties already latent in practice.

The same analysis answers our ongmal question, why the
bourgeois sciences, for all their achievement, are unable to
create a synthetic ideology but by their very development
bring about the disintegration of bourgeois culture. Sciences
are ultimately in empirical contact with reality, they have a
technical, practical basis. This differentiates science from
mere theory. This practical basis is the front, as it were,
along which science advances, and the new matter it en-
counters should travel up to the superstructure and modify
it. But, as we have seen, the superstructure or ‘world-view’
of a culture is the creation of a ruhng class which becomes
increasingly divorced from practice, mcreasingly self-
illusory and non-functional. An antagomsm therefore arises
between this central ideology and the advancing practical
front of science, which results in a cripphng and distortion
of science in proportion as it becomes generahsed, and
approaches wide theoretical formulations. As a result
science is repelled by the central ideology, and gathers itself
found Its most practical fronts which thus become closed
worlds — detached and isolated sciences. This has as a
further result the separation of the world-view from the
sciences, with its ensuing collapse and disintegration, and
the impoverishment of the now isolated, separate sciences.

Since classes are not arbitrary absolute creations, but
come into being as specific developments of economy, they
are by no means inevitable. The exploitation relationship is
not essential to society, and Marx showed that the prole-
tariat in fact occupied the special historical position of the
class destined to end classes, to bring about its own extinc-
tion as a class.

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FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

Since the bourgeoisie, once expropriated, has no social
status, it must cease to exist, and th^ the coercive content
of the State superstructure vanishes. Only one class is left —
that IS to say, there are no classes — and this class both owns
and operates the productive forces of society. There is no
longer a fundamental cleavage between theory and practice,
which now can affect each other directly and rapidly, and
each innovation in practice can at once affect the super-
structure.

Such a conception of history not only exposed the funda-
mental law of motion of social men, but it also reinstated
history as a science like other sciences, that is, one m which
practice is the ally of theory and vice-versa. No more than it
is possible to separate the science of chemistry from labora-
tory expenments, or that of cosmogony from physical
experiments, is it possible to separate history, which is the
apex of the sciences, from social activity. History then
becomes, not merely a study of inscriptions and records and
witnesses, but the means of answering questions which were
in olden days phrased in such symbohc forms as; ‘What is
my duty to my neighbour?’ ‘What is man’s destiny?’ ‘Why
is Truth independent of me?’ ‘What is the worth of Beauty?’
‘What must I do to be saved?’ ‘Is Evil real?’ History
becomes, just because it is the study of the past in the
present, the guide to the future. Since future history is made
only by the present actions of men, as they reahse them-
selves, such a history must necessarily be a guide to action
now. And each such action, by establishing or modifying or
enriching the content of the science of history, also increases
its penetrative power in analyses of the past, and enables it
with' increasing success to separate the past from that present
in which the past is imphcit.

Thus Marx and Engels not only explained the movement
of history, they also made history real and scientific by

154

MEN AND NATURE

making it a guide to man’s action in relation to society now.
Because we, in a boi^geois world, live in a time when the
superstructure of the bourgeois class cripples the productive
powers of organised labour, historical materialism is a guide
to our action in changing this superstructure and partici-
pating in the proletarian revolution. Of course it is just this
in Marxism that scandalises the bourgeoisie — it is an his-
torical science, and is therefore warm and breathing.
Historical matenahsm is not a mere dead congelation of
knowledge of the past, as if the past were something separate
from the present and outside it, or as if the social activities
of all men who went before us were altogether external to
us, instead of being forces in a movement of which we are
the momentary apex and culmination. It is the past active in
the present and aiding man actively to produce the future.

155

IV

CONSCIOUSNESS

A Study in Bourgeois Psychology
1

I T is charactenstic of bourgeois psychology that it is
confused and inconclusive in its treatment of what would
seem, to many people, the most important subject of psycho-
logical study, consciousness. Bouigeois psychology has a
choice between six doctrines about consciousness, and it
will throw light on the difficulties with which that psychology
IS faced if we detail them. —

(a) Consciousness contains the sole data of psychology
(philosophical and faculty psychologies).

(6) Consciousness is an epiphenomenon accompanying
neurological activity (neurological psychology and psycho-
physiology).

(c) Consciousness plays no causal part in behaviour,
which can be completely described and determined without
its use. Since behaviour is the only thing that can be ob-
served in others, the existence of consciousness should on
principles of epistemology be denied (behaviourism).

{d) The psyche consists of the products of one or a
number of transformed instincts; some of these products are
conscious, others are unconscious (Freudism and its deriva-
tives; and ‘hormic’ psychology).

(c) Consciousness consists of the shuffling of forms of
thought according to dynamical laws (association psy-
chology and gestalt psychology).

156

CONSCIOUSNESS

(f) In so far as any or all of the above theories produce
empirically-proven results, they are nght (eclectic or
academic psychology).

It sounds a hopeless muddle, and in fact it is a muddle
without hope as long as psychologists move within the
circle of bourgeois philosophy. Yet would anyone famihar
with contemporary psychology accuse me of overstating
the case? It is m fact usual to provide many more classifica-
tions: for example a gestalt psychologist would insist on
being separated from the old-fashioned associatiomst and
the Freudian from the adherent of McDougall, and the
follower of Jung or Adler from both.

It is obvious that aU these schools cannot be right. For
example (a) and (c) also (d) and (e) are exclusive opposites.
It is as near certain as anything can be that none of them is
nght. There is no more depressing spectacle m bourgeois
culture to-day than this of a science so important and vital
to human knowledge as psychology unable to secure
agreement about the most elementary feature of its domain.
But may not this be a necessary feature of psychology itself
which perhaps, as some scientists have suggested, can never
be a science; and is not this more hkely than that the failure
of Its psychology should be a necessary characteristic of
bourgeois culture‘s

The answer is, that not only is the anarchy of psychology
a necessary feature of bourgeois culture, but that the very
attitude of mind which supposes that psychology can never
be a science, is itself an outcome of the same fundamental
position. Bourgeois psychology grew out of biology through
the influence of physiology on philosophy; but equally
bourgeois physics affects it, for it determines on the one
hand bourgeois philosophy and on the other hand bourgeois
biology. Medicine, too, throws its contribution into
psychology through physiology and it is chiefly philosophical

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

medicine, medicine formulated in terms of the current
bourgeois philosophy. ^

Does this sound an inextncable tangle, accounting for
the confusion of psychology, the latest of the empirically
developed sciences? It does so only because the bourgeois
sciences, as an outcome of the bourgeois position, cannot
be conceived except as either confusing or dominating each
other. Either the fundamental categories of ‘the sciences’
are held to be exclusive, and nothing can result from their
combination except a mish-mash or, alternatively, one
science excludes and suppresses the categories of the others,
as m behaviounsm, the categories of bourgeois biology are
allowed to suppress those proper to psychology, and in
mechanical materialism the categories of bourgeois physics
are allowed to usurp those of all other spheres of science.
Either the spheres of the positive sciences are distinct, or
they are the same, that is the dilemma which bourgeois
science has posed for itself, and it can never imagine that
they are different and yet mutually determinative.

The bourgeois, by his fundamental position, is free ‘m
himself’. He is free not because he is conscious of his
causality, but because he is ignorant of the social causes
that determine his being. He pictures himself therefore as
standing m a dominating relation to his environment, just
as in society he seems by his dominating relation to capital
and his ownership of social labour power, to be determining
society and not determined by it.

He IS in fact deluded, for his ownership of capital does
not enable him consciously to determine society even though
his actions determine its fate. The sum of bourgeois wills
produces history, but it is not the history any one bourgeois
willed. His efforts for one thing produce another thing —
his attempts at profit produce loss, at plenty poverty, at
peace war. As his culture collapses aU his efforts to shore it

158

CONSCIOUSNESS

up hasten that collapse. He finds himself unfree after all,
although he is ‘m contror of social forces.

Why then was he ukfree‘^ Where did he err? He erred
because he did not see that his dominating relation to society
was a determining relation, which determined him as much
as he determined it. He was unconscious of this, and
therefore unable to achieve freedom. His conception of
freedom really arose as a special case of a group of illusions
about domination which has been associated with all forms
of society based on dominatmg classes. This group of
illusions has for a common factor the behef that domination
secures self-determination. But it follows from the material
umty of the Umverse that this is untrue. All the phenomena
that constitute the umverse are mutually determined. If
any group were completely self-determined it would consti-
tute a closed world, and would not exist. All relations are
determimng. The earth appears to primitive man to dominate
the cosmos — sun and stars appear to rotate round it. This
is a pleasant illusion, but it does not make us astronomers,
much less does it make us people round whom the cosmos
revolves. As soon as we reahse there is adeterminmg
relation, and become conscious of its nature and how it
grips us, we are that much freer of cosmic phenomena, and
can predict eclipses, construct sidereal time, navigate, and
govern our actions according to the necessity pf the Uni-
verse.

All previous cultures that were ideologically conscious
at all have been based on a ruling class which consciously
dominated and directed the utihsation of productive forces.
As a result all such cultures were subject to an illusion
distorting their ideologies. Slave-owmng culture conceived
freedom to consist in this, m the domination of the wiU of
one man over the will of another, the other passively
obeying this one’s wiU. This gives nse to the teleological

^59

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

explanation of the Universe, which reaches its subtlest form
in Plato’s or Aristotle’s philosophies, m which all phenomena
are determined by Ideas or Forms, lliese correspond to the
plans formed in the mind of the slave-owner which his slave
passively fuMs. This explanation apphes equally to social
and non-social phenomena, and therefore is consistent.
The domination inherent in the slave-owning system is not
repressed, as with the bourgeois, but is conscious, and the
illusion consists, not in supposing that no domination
exists, but that society is in fact really determined solely by
the will of the master, and does not in turn determine his
will. This will, which therefore appears as the first cause in
society just because it is conscious, also appears the first
cause in the Universe, as the Law of the Universe, as the
doctrine of Ends, Final Causes, Perfect Ideas (willed by one
or more supreme causes or Divine Masters) whose plans the
Umverse fulfils and thus develops.

Society IS not in fact determined by the will of a slave-
owning master, but by the productive forces at the service
of such an economy. The master’s will is itself determined
by the society m which he finds himself and, just because he
IS unconscious of these causes, the slave owner is unfree.
His world of ends is inadequate, not only as a basis for
sociology, but also for physics, biology and psychology.
It cannot exhibit true causal relations: only demons dis-
guised as final causes. The slave-owning world, incapable
of being deeply scientific or analytical, inevitably mardies
on to the Empire, whose fiction it is that the whole Empire’s
activity is controlled by the williif one master, the Emperor.
And this Empire as inevitably marches on to ruin, for the
productive forces are not controlled by the will of the
Emperor but instead, cnppled by slave-owning productive
relations, the Impenal economy decays for all his efforts, and
it IS a world whose income has steadily diminished, whose

i6o

CONSCIOUSNESS

sod IS impoverished and whose people is demoralised, that
crumbles at any push from the barbarians so easily repelled
at the height of the Empire’s power.

No less than the slave-owmng, the feudal civilisation is
m the grip of the illusion of dominion- The domimon is
still conscious, as it is in slave-owmng civilisation, and
therefore necessanly gives nse to a physics and to a world-
view in which all causes are final causes — conscious pur-
poses in the mind of a dominating master. In this respect it
simply takes over Anstotehanism, the most consistent
expression of slave-owmng philosophy. But now this
domination is regarded as necessarily exercised according to
a hierarchy of privdege; the day of unrestricted property
in slaves is over. The dominating relation is exercised
‘according to law’, and this law itself is only the reflection of
the Roman technical apparatus of learmng, social orgamsa-
tion, and administrative skill taken over with the Church
from the Empire by the barbarian overlords. This techmcal
apparatus becomes symbolised as Christendom, as the
monopoly of the Church, as benefit of clergy, as an instru-
ment which must be used to sanction aU acts of domination,
from kingship to kmghthood. Anstotehanism must there-
fore be modified: and while final causes are stiU the explana-
tory mechanism these final causes are, in Scholasticism and
Thomism, causes which are established by a law of God,
which can only work themselves out according to a fiat
given forth at the Creation. The world works accordmg to
God-sanctioned laws which have a purpose, and have had a
purpose from the beginmng of time. These laws are not
self-dnving, but require the continual impetus of deity.
They can therefore be suspended at any time by the Divine
Will, but such miracles are rare.

Science therefore in feudal civilisation is still in embryo
but it is yet a stage nearer birth than in slave-owning society.

T7 i6i

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

A domimon which, in addition to the free will of the master,
requires also the sanction of the impersonal law, is already
well on the way to be determined, feven if it is determined
from above by another dominating will — God’s. A world
ruled by law is well on the way to being a world ruled by
causality.

In a sense this is an accident. Feudal law is only the
Imperial law of slave-owning society preserved through the
survival of Roman economy in the monastery-farm,
example to the barbarian of agricultural eflSiciency and
therefore the ancestor of the manor. But the fact of this
survival changes it. In Roman society, law’s sanction is
simply this, that it expresses the will of the Divine Emperor,
who owns his people hke a slave-owner. To medieval
society, to the barbarian invader, law comes as something
outside the will of the ruler, as an impersonal and pre-existing
body of law, as Christendom, with which he must comply if
the social production from which he draws tribute is to be
earned on, for that production functions according to these
laws, and otherwise collapses in anarchy. The law therefore
appears, not as a fiat of any serf-owner’s will but as some-
thing determining in some measure the range of will of both
serf and serf owner, a something existent from the begmmng
of time. Hence feudal society provides the necessary
transition to the bourgeois position.

This transition is achieved within the limits of its own
illusion by bourgeois culture. The scholastic world laws are
stripped of their final causes and become self-driving, while
the question of the reason for and time of their issue by the
Creator is postponed or treated as outside the province of
science. Science is thus conceived for the first time as the
field of laws which connect phenomena in a mutually
determining way, and are sufficiently explained by exhibiting
the structure of that determinism. These laws do not

i6s

CONSCIOUSNESS

require as their sanction a final cause nor a clearly expressed
divine place in the cosmos and do not therefore explain
nature as the vehicle of^onscious wills exercising dominion.

This ought to be the death of animism. Animism is
nothing but the attribution to nature, as the sujEcient cause
of all phenomena, of human wills, due to the primitive’s
illusion that the will is a freely determining cause in itself,
and not in the act of willing itself determined. In primitive
commumsm, where there is no domination or division of
labour, such wills seem present in every individual freely
determimng his behaviour as a cause, and therefore by
analogy they are held to play the same part in the beneficent
or maleficent activities of trees, stones, and stars, which
obey their own wills without overlords. But the slave-owner
IS weU aware that though the slave may will as he please,
the slave’s will is not the cause of the slave’s activities, which
are caused by his master’s will. He therefore subtihses
animism to this extent, that trees and stones have not wills
of their own, but are passive subjects to a god’s wiU:

From haunted spring, and dale
Edg’d with poplar pale,

The parting Gemus is with sighing sent,

With fiowre-inwov’n tresses torn
The Nimphs m twihght shade of tangled thickets
mourn.

So early Greek ammism, with the development of its
economy, gives place to the teleology of Aristotle.

The slave-owner is at tunes visited with a mghtmare.
He finds that his free will, in spite of its freedom, is thwarted,
not by a superior will but by things-in-themselves — ^by
inferior wills, accidents, mistakes, and his own ignorance.
Yet he is still unable to conceive his will except as being
thwarted hke that of his slave’s by another will, and since he

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FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

the master is so thwarted, might not even the world’s master
and his — God Himself — be thwarted in his vohtion by some ■
grand over-ridmg will, by Will-in-Eself^ This is the slave-
owning conception of Moira, or Fate, a comparatively late
development reaching its noblest expression in Greek
tragedy. This Fate, in spite of its closeness to bourgeois
determinism, betrays its slave-owning parentage by the fact
that It is always visualised as a consciously foreseeing Will,
and always as thwarting, not determining human wills as
well as events, but interfering with human wills by means of
events.

Amimsm, slave-owning teleology and Fate, feudal tele-
ology and Law, these then are the steps by which society
m its development explains the world. It was the role of
the bourgeois to carry a step forward, not only society’s
productive development but also and necessarily also its
explanation of the Universe.

# # * ♦ ♦

The bourgeois first finds himself as one of a class whose
development is restricted by feudal privilege and the reign
of law imposed by Christendom. He therefore revolts
against it and, in the circumstances in which he finds himself,
he necessarily formulates his case as follows: —

(i) The dominating relations of one man over another are
evil, and must be ehmmated, for they hold up productive
forces (that is, the productive forces of my class).

(n) Law is not something immutable existing from the
beginning of time and imposed on men from without. Any
such imposed law is wrong. A man’s law is in himself.
What seems to him in the given circumstances best or proper
to do, is right, and there should be no other law.

This means that the bourgeois turns Catholic dogma into
personal Protestantism, and that all feudal laws, monopohes,

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CONSCIOUSNESS

or privileges which restrict his doing what seems best to
himself, are abohshed in the course of his revolution-
Those restrictive laws'" are, however, all laws interfering
with his nght to acquire, ahenate and own capital.
He does not however regard this right as a ‘law’, but as
something given in the nature of things, and in his own
nature.

The bourgeois thus emerges to consciousness as a man
whose views of the world are determined by social causes,
just hke the slave-owner or lord. Freedom consists in this,
in each man’s doing what seems best to himself, consulting,
not some good laid down by law hke the service to his over-
lord by which the feudal landowner held his land, but his
own good. Out of this apparent confusion of personal com-
petition will emerge (according to the bourgeois) a world-
order that is the best possible, because it is the product of
freedom. To this illusion the bourgeois is completely
committed by his revolutionary programme.

But as I explained elsewhere, * this society, in spite of its
apparent individual freedom, is still based on a dominating
relation. The bourgeois as the source of uncontrolled free
activity m society, must necessarily be uncontrolled in his
ownership of social capital. This apparently innocent
dominating relation to a thing also involves, after all,
dominion over men, just as in previous societies, but unhke
the ruhng class in previous societies the bourgeois cannot
consciously assert dominion over other wills as a law of
society; on the contrary he is committed to repress the
knowledge or deny the existence of such a law. Moreover
the very dominion thus exercised imposes a conflict in
society between the haves and have-nots, which would
become overt and suicidal to society if it were not forcibly
repressed and kept harmless, not once and for all, but as

* V ‘Pacifism and Violence’ in Studies in a Dying Culture,

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FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

long as the antagonising domination exists, which is as long
as culture remains bourgeois.

Thus after a bourgeois revolution, the resultant strife is
suppressed by a ‘strong man’ who forcibly imposes a coer-
cive law on haves and have-nots alike, making possible
unrestricted capitalism. In Enghsh history this strong man
is, after the bourgeois Reformation, the Tudor monarch,
and, after the Revolution, Cromwell. In France he is
Napoleon. But this ‘strong man’, though necessary, is by
bourgeois standards himself an anomaly, and as soon as he
has called mto being laws protecting bourgeois rights, he is
ehminated in favour of a rubber stamp monarch (the
Glorious Revolution of England) or a President (France)
and the bourgeois task then becomes simply the preservation
of this body of law in its main principles (the constitution,
democracy, etc.) with the incorporation of such minor
amendments as social development renders necessary
(legislation). These laws are now hypostatised as the essence
of hberty and justice (freedom and parliamentary demo-
cracy).

How is this change reflected in the world of science, with
which we are concerned? The world of science follows the
same course. The first attempt at a bourgeois world-view
as homogeneous as that of Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas
necessarily fails from the outset by reason of this split in the
bourgeois position. Either classicism or feudahsm can
achieve a homogeneous world-view in a far more consistent
anticipation of Schopenhauer’s philosophy; the ‘World as
Will and Idea’ (or rather, as Will and Aim). And, unlike
Schopenhauer’s, such a world-view expresses in a refined
form the viewpoint of all thinking men in that culture.
This the bourgeois never achieves.

He is divided between two contradictory points of view.
In himself he is exempt from determimsm, not because of

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CONSCIOUSNESS

the dominating relation of his class to society (as with
classical society) but through the absence of any conscious
relation to other men at all. Other men neither dominate
him nor are dominated by him (he thinks), and the ideal
society, to which all bourgeois stave, is one in which each
umt IS insulated, and the world of society and of values
drives on in the best possible way as the result of the in-
dependent, self-motivated action of every free bourgeois.

At the same time he stands, as owner and master of social
capital, m a dommatmg relation to ‘Nature’, his environ-
ment. Social capital is the crystallisation of men’s attempts
to control nature through their empmcal knowledge of its
causahty. He is in charge of this mampulation of nature,
but this IS not a relation of will hke that of classical society,
for the bourgeois by his position is committed to the belief
that a dominating relation to a thing (private property) is
not a dominating relation at all. It is therefore a relation m
which will does not enter m the sense that to will a thing is
to have the slave do it if it is do-able, and if not — well, slaves
are not perfect and it is not for the master to do the slave’s
busmess for him. It is a new kmd of relation in which the
bourgeois as it were ‘administers’ a thing, so as to draw out
from Its intrinsic quahties the maximum benefit to society,
which, in bourgeois language, appears translated as ‘the
maximum profit to himself’. Of course he is not really
admimstering property, he is exploiting labour power.

Unhke the classic or feudal position, such a position is
from the outset self-contradictory, and will never be able to
generate a consistent world-view; duahsm is implicit in it.
For from the bourgeois point of view, in the world of society
freedom seems to inhere in the mdividual will unconscious
of any causahty or outer necessity; but m the world of
nature, freedom seems to inhere in the drawing-out by the
will of the necessary qualities in Nature and, therefore, in

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FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

consciousness of the necessity of Nature. The first view is
completely fallacious; but the second is nearer reality than
a teleological explanation, and therefore bourgeois culture
IS culture which gives birth for the first time to a science of
the environment of nature, a thing almost unknown to
previous cultures. Nonetheless, the fundamental fallacy of
this position means that increasing success in the second, or
scientific, world view will add to the inconsistency and
anarchy of the first, and ultimately the second world view
will itself become affected, for both are only abstractions
from the one reality.

» « «

We have in other essays explored different aspects of the
disintegration of bourgeois science; here we merely concen-
trate on the duel between physics and psychology. The
bourgeois looked round on his social world and unconsci-
ously projected it into the world of physics, into his
environment. He therefore discovered new truths about his
environment, for the world of society is a part of reality.
But, coming back to society, he could not, because the pro-
jection was unconscious, see society as determined in the
way the world of physics was determined, for to do so
would be to make social necessity conscious. He stood in
his own light. As a bourgeois he had been unconscious of
any necessity determining his action, for the bourgeois law
for social action is ‘Do as you will’. It forgets to state
whether (a) you can do as you will; (b) you can will what you
will.

Hence the world of physics, in which the ‘wills’ of the
particles are determined at first by God but later by the
relations of the particles themselves, would have been the
basis of an accurate view of bourgeois society, but the bour-
geois was unable to achieve it. He kept on getting near it, but

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CONSCIOUSNESS

always this fundamental conviction that his will and desires
were the source of social motion prevented it. If on the one
hand he saw society as a network of determining relations
and, on the other hand, his own mind as determmed by
this, he would have seen that not only did society produce
from its interaction laws of supply and demand’, but that
his conceptions of justice and nght were also determmed by
society. But this last step he could never make, for to him
his own self was the source of the free energy which, inter-
acting with bourgeois society, gave rise to economic law.

This failure meant that he conceived his desires and
notions of justice, morality and so forth, as not m any way
determined, but as primary and therefore eternal. Neces-
sanly, the type of society of which these were the outcome
was the eternal type of society — ^any deviation was either
discredited or was an accident.

This results m three different worlds which are of major
importance in understanding the distortion of bourgeois
thought.

(i) The world of physics. This world, modelled on
bourgeois society unconsciously grasped in expenence by
the bourgeois, is a world of particles trading freely with each
other and giving nse to laws of supply and demand which
dictate the behaviour of the world as a whole. Because
nature is not a dominated slave, but an administered thing,
it is non-hvmg and non-mental: a-teleological therefore and
stripped of aU quality.

It is a closed world, which does not interact with the
bourgeois, who surveys it to learn its laws and use it hke a
machine — Whence it is in absolute space and time, independent
of the observing mind. In order that it should not be in
determining relation with mind, it is by definition bare of all
quahties found in mind (the so-called sensory or secondary
qualities). But these ultimately are found to include all

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

material qualities. Consequently the bourgeois closed world
of physics, by definition restricted to matter, which matter
is defined as ‘non-mind’, becomes barer and barer of real
qualities until ‘nothing’ is left. But something must be left —
there are the concepts that describe the ‘structure’ of this
nothing. Thus mechanical materialism by its very premises
is pushed on to become its apparent opposite, mentahsm,
which it reaches with Mach, Eddington, Jeans, and their
followers.

The closed world of matter, restricted to non-mental
quahties, is bound to collapse. ‘Pure’ physics is bound to
reveal itself as an illusion. This it does by flying into two
contradictory halves. On the one hand absolute space and
time, independent of the observer, is saved by fusing them
(space-time) and using the elaborate apparatus of the tensor
to eliminate the determining effect of the observer and close
the world by making it ‘invariant for all transformations’.
On the other hand tlus is flatly contradicted by quantum
mechanics, which is composed partly of matrices of observa-
tions alone, partly of waves in absolute time-space which
are not however waves of matter but waves indicating the
probability of matter being present. In both cases matter is
supposed to lurk behind the numbers as an unknowable
Ding-an-sich.

(li) The ' closed world of sociology. Here, once again, the
bourgeois surveys a world from outside, and since his mind
is not determined by it, though he hves in it, the social
concepts m his mind are eternal (the laws of appetite, supply
and demand, justice, free trade, etc.). These concepts
therefore function in the world of sociology as laws regulat-
ing the free clash of individuals, and not as products of
certain stages of that clash. Consequently, as in the famous
mercantile examples, if two men meet on a desert island,
their transactions strangely enough always and mevitably

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CONSCIOUSNESS

produce bourgeois economics, and this is taken as a proof
of the vahdity of the bourgeois concepts. It follows from
this that although the bourgeois can give a fairly accurate
picture of contemporary sociology, it is a static picture, and
neglects the vital laws of motion. Pigou can seriously devote
a book to ‘The Economics of a Stationary State’. Hence —
not only is all bourgeois economics false as a science, and
therefore as a guide to prediction and action, but it cannot
give a deterministic and causal picture of the development
of society m aU its varieties of culture. Thus the closed world
of bourgeois sociology is far less accurate than the closed
world of physics. Both are absolute, but whereas in the
history of man the environment does not to any degree alter,
society itself alters rapidly, and thus bourgeois culture pre-
cludes itself from writing a scientific history of any feature of
its culture from economics to religion. Yet change mani-
festly occurs and therefore some force must be invoked
from an outside world to produce these changes. On the
one hand ludicrously simple causes from spheres anterior to
the sociological will be brought in as suflSciently explanatory
— climatic changes, racial differences, differential birthrate
dietetic deficiencies (Marett), or, on the other hand,
causes from spheres posterior to the sociological will be
used in explaining the change — great Ideas, the invention of
steam, the concept of hberty (H. A. Fisher), a cycle of flour-
ishing and decay (Spengler). Both forms of explanation are
equally unscientific but are preferred by the bourgeois to
admitting that he is unconsciously determined by social
relations, and that the ‘fundamentaT categories he has
carefully established for sociology, are simply the product
of his own particular phase of social relations.

(in) The closed world of psychology. It was inevitable
that the bourgeois should excel himself when he came to
establish the categones of his own mind. The closed world

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FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

of psychology is as it were the antithesis of the closed world
of physics. Now if we abstract from mind all ‘material’
qualities we travel the reverse road to bourgeois physics and
we end up with something that contains no qualities at all.
That is to say, consciousness is ‘nothing’. But mind exists
and the brain exists, therefore mind is simply physical matter
in its sensory aspects, the behaviour of the body. Thus whilst
in physics the bourgeois recipe for matter, ‘not-mmd,’ was
producing a matter so stripped of all material qualities as to
evaporate into mind (cp Eddington, Jeans and Russell);
m psychology the bourgeois recipe for mind, ‘not-matter,’
was producing a mind so stripped of all mental quahties
that it sohdified into matter, and became behaviourism.
These two doctrines, so apparently opposed, produce each
other, and follow from the one bourgeois position.

Before this, however, the bourgeois standpoint had
succeeded in generating all the other distortions of psy-
chology we have listed at the beginning of this essay. The
simplest bourgeois position is that, since mind is not deter-
mined and is therefore free, the laws of the mind can only be
studied in its products. But to consciousness, mind’s pro-
ducts are all conscious products. Only the world of con-
sciousness exists for psychology and, by this definition,
psychology is the study not merely of non-material but of
‘non-unconscious’ qualities of the mind.

The first attempts at this form of bourgeois psychology are
systematic. They are merely the classification of conscious
phenomena (Faculty psychology). Since the psychological
field IS undetermined there is no reason why faculties should
not be anything, and as a result they are merely subsumed
according to the prejudices of the moment and the structure
of language at the time.

But it is impossible by reason of the very nature of
knowledge that any field can be depicted as indetermined

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CONSCIOUSNESS

within itself, for every positive statement must necessarily
express some kind of determinism. The most the bourgeois
position claims is that mental phenomena are, in their own
sphere, self-determined. The next step from faculty psy-
chology IS therefore the study of the self-detenmnation of
psychological products. The bourgeois, freely wandering
about the world he dominates, acquires images of it or
ideas, and these interact and hve their hves, and combine
and move by virtue of causal laws, parallel to but different
from those that rule the world of particles in the closed
world of physics. This closed world of Ideas, foreshadowed
in Locke, reaches its final development in the associationists,
with whom everything is explained by the ‘association of
ideas’. It still represents an important influence in all
modem psychologies, for it appears to solve the problem of
the closed worlds by creating two parallel worlds, quite in
the manner of Descartes.

But unfortunately biology, itself a closed world, here
erupts to shatter this dream of the parallel worlds, one of
physics in which particles move accordmg to physical laws,
and the other of conscious ideas in which images of the real
world move accordmg to mental ‘laws’. Biology, in human
physiology, discovers a connecting hnk breaking into both
worlds. On the one hand the body is composed of particles
subject to physical laws, on the other hand, as aphasia and
cerebral injuries show, disturbance of particles of the body
leads to a disturbance of ‘ideas’. The two absolute worlds
must be joined.

This is the function of neurology. To neurology, how-
ever delicately its practisers may veil their position, the
nerves (and particularly the cerebral neurones) are subject
to electncal disturbances or waves of potential variation as
the result of kimuh, and these waves are accompamed by
ideas, just as the passage of an electnc current across two

m

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

poles in the atmosphere is accompanied by a spark. Great
success is achieved by neurology in its correlation of consci-
ous with physiological phenomena. .

In this way mind is forced into the closed world of physics.
The particles still move about m absolute time and space
(for few, if any, neurologists have advanced to Einstein’s
absolute time-space) but now their movements arc accom-
panied by a kind of iridescence or glow, which is mind.

The closed world of physics is a world dominated by the
bourgeois, viewing it from outside and therefore able to
foresee, by a Divine Calculation, the whole course of future
movements of particles. This is bourgeois predeterminism,
in which the whole future ean be imagined as consciously
known in its necessary future evolution, like the movements
of a machine, just as in slave-owning fatalism the whole
future can be imagined as consciously planned. In the former
case the necessity arises from the causality of things; in the
latter from the will of the planner; but in both cases the pre-
destination consists in the conscious pre-knowledge of
events.

But if consciousness itself is — as it evidently is — a late
development of the Universe, such a conception falls to
the ground. And if mind is also part of the network of
determinism, each act of knowing involved in consciousness
plays a determining as well as a determined rdlc, and the
mere fact of being all-knowing like Laplace’s divine cal-
culator, would involve a new determining force not allowed
for in the original act of knowledge.

To the bourgeois the world of physics has its lines laid
down irrespective of mind; it exists absolutely. When facts
force him to include mind in this already complete, self-
driving world, It IS therefore simply dragged round with the
machinery. Mind becomes pointless and redundant. What
the bourgeois thought was the ‘ennoblement’ of mind — ^its

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CONSCIOUSNESS

separation as a distinct thing from gross matter — ^is in fact its
degradation, for now it becomes involved in the mindless
causality of bourgeois physics, a causahty abstracted of
mental quahties, though consciously envisaged as a whole
by impersonal Mind. Consciousness is to this abstract Mind
an irrelevant phenomenon arising from the predetermmed
clash of particles

Nothing could in fact be more repugnant to the bourgeois
than this logical outcome of his contradictory position.
Therefore bourgeois causahty, or predetermmism (the only
form of determinism he understands), is the bourgeois
nightmare, and it induces him to lead an attack in full force
on determinism or causahty in physics (Jeans, Eddington,
Weyl, Born, et at). It leads him at last to picture, by whatever
immoral stratagem, the movements of the particles as in-
determined; and the particles themselves as unknowable.
This he supposes, at last secures his menaced free-will. But
m fact free-will does not lie along this road at all.

« # ^ *

Thus the neurological approach is the most fruitful to-day
in scientific results, yet it is also the most destructive to
bourgeois psychology and bourgeois self-esteem. Mind is a
material quality, and therefore all mental phenomena are
necessarily phenomena displayed by material neurones.
But by ‘matter’ the neurologist does not understand real
sensuous matter, for he is a bourgeois physicist, and more-
over in most cases a Newtonian bourgeois physicist. He
only understands matter as it appears in the bourgeois closed
world of physics, stripped of mental qualities, a completely
self-determined world excluding mind as expressing a
determimng relation. Therefore neurological data, growing
in certainty and precision, seem more and more to dissolve
psychology into somethmg non-mental and predetermined,

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FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

until we are ready to believe consciousness is an unimportant
illusion. This is necessarily so, for a method of approach that
sees colour, for example, as an hallucination, the real thing
being a wave length, must even more see consciousness as an
illusion, the real thing being a moving wave of potential.
Thus bourgeois consciousness, in all seriousness (with
maudlin regret even) denies its own existence, or, alterna-
tively, if this ‘daring’ view seems dangerous, as easily and
from the same fundamental position, denies the existence of
anything else but consciousness.

Neurology, like early faculty and associationist psycholo-
gies, at first sees the problem in its simplest terms —
consciousness or mind on the one hand, and on the other
hand the physico-physiological world or matter. The
categories of both are regarded as eternal.

Nonetheless, various considerations operate to make this
simple dualism more complex In the field of faculty or
associationist psychology there is the problem of memory.
Ideas vanish and then return (recollection) and return per-
haps changed. But they must have been somewhere mean-
while. Where were they stowed? The answer is ‘In the
Unconscious’. Needless to say, this is at present no answer.
To answer the question ‘Where are Ideas when they are not-
conscious?’ with ‘In the not-consciousness’ is childish. How-
ever, if new laws of the process governing not-consciousness
are learned, the answer is the starting point of research, and
in modern psychology the Unconscious does therefore mean
something.

Neurology is not perplexed by the problem in this form.
Ideas, being a chance glow, can come or go, no explanation
is needed. The problem here anses in a somewhat difierent
form.

(a) The cortex and (6) the thalamus, the cerebellum, and
the spinal cord represent phylogenetically difierent stages of

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CONSCIOUSNESS

the growth of the nervous system, and seem to correspond
to different kinds of nervous behaviour — (a) voluntary
behaviour, or willed response, corresponding to a previously
conscious idea, {b) reflex behaviour, or innate, automatic,
unchanging response to stimuh. These two forms of
behaviour are not separate, but all behaviour combmes
differing proportions of each, and the umt of behaviour
seems rather the conditioned reflex, m which an innate
pattern has been modified by experience. Voluntary
behaviour, in which an ‘idea’ is at work, is in its purest form
still hke a conditioned reflex, since pre-existing muscular
reflexes must be used in behaviour of any kind, and the
‘idea’ itself is a product of expenence.

Thus neurology becomes the study of the integration or
mutual interaction of the phylogenetically diSerent systems
of neurones, and of the modification of innate responses by
experience. The ‘problem’ of consciousness is solved by
supposing that consciousness is associated with cortical
innervations, for man is highly conscious and the cortex is
phylogenetically the most recent development of the nervous
system. The whole problem is in fact visualised as that of
the human machine, quite in the manner of Frederick’s
physician. The stimuli excite nervous activity, behaviour
results, and at the end of the behaviour the machine is in a
new position of equihbrium. This is an improvement on the'
closed world of physics in that it is more sensuous and
therefore more material. Behaviour, attention, perception
and appetite cannot be written in terms of Pnnciples of
Least Action or Lagrange’s equations. But man is still sub-
ject to predeter mimsm; he is still merely a part of the closed
world of physics surveyed from without. However much
neurologists may dishke to admit it, the philosophy of
neurology is mechanical matenahsm even where (as for
example with MacCurdy), an amateurish attempt is made

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FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

to escape into a Platonic doctrine of Ideas controlling form-
less matter (‘Patterns’).

# iff ¥

Meanwhile gestalt psychology has been making an attempt
to reconcile the associatiomst position with the develop-
ment, since Mill’s time, of neurology. The gestaltists are not,
however, neurologists, they do not regard mmd as the
indescence accompanying the movement of particles. Since
mechanical materiahsm is not their method of approach the
gestalt psychologists are forced into the only other bourgeois
alternative — ^ideahsm. Gestalt psychology is Platonic
ideahsm.

Needless to say it is not just Platonic idealism, but
bourgeois Platonic idealism a.tered by all that has been
learned since, and moreover applied, not to a world view
but to a very limited field, chiefly so far that of perception.
It starts out with an apparently materialistic programme —
all mental phenomena to be explained on a purely physico-
chemical basis. Now we are familiar with such programmes.
Physics had one — ‘all matter non-mental’ — whose logical
outcome, to the surprise of no one but the bourgeois, is that
all matter proves to be — equations. In the same way, since
physics and chemistry result in bourgeois science from
similar retnctive programmes, a physico-chemical explana-
tion of mental data must necessarily be dangerous. It turns
out to be purely Hegelian. Gestalt psychology is objective
Ideahsm of a kind. The psychological phenomena dealt
with are the result of the activation of forms or configurations
(gestalten) which are pictured as fields patterned three or
even four-dimensionally by vanations in potential. Stimuli
serve both for the activation and modification of these
potential-patterns. But a form or pattern is a concept. Is not
a concept a late product of consciousness and if so, how can

lyS

CONSCIOUSNESS

we explain mental phenomena as the result of the activation
of more recent products of itself? We must therefore assume
the existence of these concepts, or forms, objecUvely, Now
this is Platomsm if carried out half-heartedly, or Hegehan*
ism, if earned out thoroughly. It is characteristic of the
anarchy of bourgeois science that every scientist, m his httle
province, feels himself at hbeity to use for that field only
categories which, if applied to the world at large, would
seem to him false. The gestalt psychologist is not really a
Hegehan. To bourgeois science the closed worlds of modem
culture do not seem even a necessary evil; they seem to him
part of the method of science, and he feels himself a scien-
tific benefactor m bmlding yet another of them on a small
scale.

« 4!e « »

Meanwhile, apart from neurology and gestalt psychology,
another psychology has been growing which, while least
scientific in its theory, has the largest empmeal content.
It IS perhaps the most thoroughly bourgeois m spirit and is
therefore the most powerful in its influence on contemporary
thought. This is the varied field of instmct psychology, of
which two schools may be taken as representative: Freud’s
psycho-analysis and McDougall’s ‘hormic’ psychology.
There are about half a dozen others, of which Jung’s,
Adler’s, McCurdy’s and Burrow’s are the most important.

Both see life as the theatre of an indwelhng force or
conation (McDougall) or instinct (Freud) which is the free
source of hfe’s actions on the static environment. A sharp
hne IS thus drawn between hfe and not-life, between agent
and patient, in which hfe is always insurgent, creative and
changeful, and dead matter always resigned, moulded and
eternal.

The drama of the instmets then becomes a kind of

m

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

bourgeois novel, in which the heroes are the instincts; and
their expenences, mutual struggles and transformations
generate not only all psychical but also all cultural
phenomena.

Such a view is a fairly accurate description of life as it
sees itself in bourgeois consciousness. It is a biological
psychology, and therefore makes the same mistake as
physical psychology (neurology) and mental psychology
(associatiomsm). It dichotomises hfe and the environment,
and defines the environment as ^ that which possesses no
living qualities. The environment is stripped of all quahties
common to dead matter and life, and therefore becomes
somethmg invariant, ghostly, and ummportant. Everything
emerges from within life.

This is the closed world of biology. All change, develop-
ment, and quahty is cooped up within it. Outside is only
the Sahara of bourgeois phsyics, quantitative, changeless,
bare. AH freedom, all self-determination and all motive
force therefore comes within the world of life. Change is
not a quality of matter but of life. It becomes a special case
in the Universe, and therefore inexplicable. The biological
dichotomy necessarily leads us, if we expand it, to an un-
caused first cause, a Life-Force or vital spirit, which by its
ingression in matter makes matter change and develop and
therefore hving, for change is regarded as a characteristic
peculiar to life. Of course instinct psychology does not
advance to such a world-view, or press its assumptions to
their logical conclusion. It simply takes as a proven thing
the closed world of bourgeois biology, and from it extracts
the essence of hving action, the instincts, which then become
the postulates of psychology.

What in fact are these instincts? They are innate patterns
of behaviour automatically elicited by stimuh. They are
therefore inevitable recurrences amid the sea of change, like

i8o

CONSCIOUSNESS

the seasons. They are determined in fact (predetermined) by
past events. The absoluteness at once reveals them as
quantitative abstractions, hke energy or space m physics.

But this is not how the bourgeois sees them. He neces-
sarily regards all behaviour that bursts ‘spontaneously’ forth
from the mdividual ignorant of its causahty, as above all
free. Therefore the instincts are conceived as freely striving
for unconscious goals, and psychology becomes the ad-
ventures of the free instincts in their struggles against the
restraints of the environment (in Freud, of society) which
impede and cripple their freedom. Out of this struggle
cognitive and emotional consciousness is born.

Now the only objection to this bourgeois psychology is
that it mverts the picture. The instincts are not free springs
of connation towards a goal. They are, so far as they can be
abstractly separated, unconscious necessities, as Kant
reahsed. They are unfree. But in their reahsation as
behaviour, when these innate things-m-themselves become
things-for-themselves and interact with their environment
(which also changes, and is not the dead world of physics)
they also change. Above aU, they are changed in human
culture. As a result of this change, these necessities become
conscious, become emotion and thought; they exist for
themselves and are altered thereby. The change is the
emotion or thought, and now they are no longer the instincts,
for they are conscious and consciousness i^ not an ethereal
but a material determimng relationship. The necessity that is
conscious is not the necessity that is unconscious. The con-
scious goal IS different from the bhnd ‘instinctive’ goal. It is
freer.

But how can bourgeois instinct psychology grasp this?
The magnificent story of human culture becomes in its view
simply the tragedy of the cnpphng of the free mstincts by the
social restraints they have freely created. The creation of

i8i

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

these social restraints is arbitrary, non-causal and pointless,
so that history remains thoroughly bourgeois and indeter-
mined, and each psycho-analyst can give a different explana-
tion of any sociological phenomenon. Experience, ait and
science are in this psychology the fetters of the instinctive
energy, all experiences are the scars of the wounds to this
freedom (inhibition and repression). Moreover the un-
conscious plays a strange role Since experience is m this
inversion of life’s story the prison house of the free instincts,
consaousness (the most recent and least innate products of
the psyche) acts the part of gaoler to the unconscious (the
most archaic and least conditioned psychic products).
Quite a little coercive State reigns in the psyche, complete
even to the Censor. Aboimnable things are done to the
instincts; screams (dreams and obsessions) issue from time
to time from the dungeons where the noble bourgeois
revolutionaries are being tortured by the authorities. It is a
picture in the best anarchist style, with the instincts resorting
even to terrorism when necessary, and this terrorism is very
sympathetically treated by its historians.

And yet this is untrue. It is m the process of living, in
experience, that the instincts, those blind patterns, are
modified by reahty and, becoming conscious of its necessity,
change it and themselves, and so become more free. This
embrace with reality is in man mediated by the social
environment. That the environment does wrongs to man’s
mind to-day none will deny. These wrongs are not done
because consciousness imprisons the instincts with the
fetters of necessity; but because bourgeois man is unconsci-
ous of the determinism of his culture. Because of this the
instincts are losing such freedom as they attained, are
becoming crippled, and less free. Unconsciousness and in-
experience, not consciousness and experience, are the gaolers
of modem bourgeois man.

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CONSCIOUSNESS

2

*

Thus bourgeois culture cannot use even those good things
which It produces. In the ideological sphere as well as the
economic, it is embarrassed because it cannot consume the
'*"empmcal discovenes it has made. Freud, Jung, Adler,
McDougall, Kohler, Kofifka, Watson, Head, Sherrington,
Parsons and MacCurdy have all made discovenes of vital
importance for the understanding of mental phenomena, but
their full value is lost in the welter of bourgeois culture.

The closed, unplanned worlds of bourgeois science must
be broken down, if science is once again to be coherent and
fruitful. That is the task of commumst science, of dialectical
matenalism.

Consciousness is a function of hfe, and we know it
pnmarily as a function of the nervous system. Yet until we
see that its relations are not intrinsically pecuhar to the
nervous system or even to the body as such, but contain
elements common to all real matter, though these elements
have been carefully rubbed out of the ‘matter’ of bourgeois
physics, we can never escape from mentahsm or mechamcal
materiahsm. The very nomenclature of modem psychology
is mythological.

What is the organ of consciousness? It would be almost
reasonable to ask of the earth, what is the organ of hquidity.
The answer ‘water’ would not be very helpful. And yet
neurology has an answer of sorts.

The optic thalamus and its outgrowths lie buried in those
cerebral hemispheres whose convoluted folds of grey
matter, known as the cortex, are hypertrophied in man.
The properties of the thalamus have been investigated at a
more recent date than those of the cortex. It represents the
more pnmitive portion of man’s brain, found well developed

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FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

even in lower aiumals. The elaborate cortex is a rich out-
growth of this part of the brain. Naturally therefore the
thalamus is regarded as the seat of man’s more primitive
mental functions, and the cortex of his characteristically
human mentation, notably ‘reason’, ‘intelhgence’, and
‘consciousness’.

The thalamus appears to be the grand shunting station
for cerebral messages. All sensory relations between brain
and objects, save those for smell, are ‘projected’ m the
thalamus and then sent up to be re-projected in the cortex.
Smell, however passes straight through to the cortex. Motor
messages to nerve plates in muscles, also pass from the
motor area of the cortex, down through the thalamus, to be
distributed via the spinal cord to the body.*

The cortex consists of fold upon fold of only shghtly-
differentiated neurones. Its hypertrophy in man is generally
correlated with the plasticity of man’s behaviour. He comes
into the world a tabula rasa for habits. Unlike the fixed
instinctive reactions of the insects, his behaviour is mainly
acqmred. It is assumed therefore that the staggeringly
complex nerve mesh of the cortex, with its hundreds of
milhons of cells, is the blank page on which life writes its
message.

This has been borne out by the study of cortical lesions.
The motor habits of speech, the senses of sight and hearing,
the habits of word recognition, writing, and of moving
vanous parts of the body, have all been localised in parts of
the cortex.

The pnmitive nature of the thalamus is suggested by
comparison with animals. As one ascends in time the evolu-
tionary tree the cortex grows in bulk, whilst the thalamus

* Motor impulses do not actually pass through the thalamus as this
passage might imply The mam motor tract passes between the thala-
mus and the basal ganglia The thalamus however has connections
with other, more primitive, motor nuclei.— B. H K.

184

CONSCIOUSNESS

and Its associations do not. Some claim that those have
even dimimshed. It is a matter of terminology. The thal-
amus Itself has perhaps d\vindled slightly, but its associated
non-cortical outgrowths, which may be assumed to share
thalamic functions, have somewhat increased. There is no
dispute about the quite disproportionate mcrease in cortical
volume.

However, the argument from morphology might be
faulty. The thalamus might after all be like the cortex in
function. The expenments of Head, Rivers, Sherrington,
and Parsons, have discovered evidence which supports the
morphological argument. Where for any reason connections
between the thalamus and cortex are severed, so that the
cortex IS out of action, activity seems to become more
instinctive. Up to a point nothing happens, and then there
is a sudden and violent reaction, accompamed by emotions
of disproportionate strength. This kind of action has been
taken to be characteristic of instinct — the ‘all or none’
reaction — and hence this is held to confirm the primitive
character of the thalamus.

Head’s bold experiment of severing a nerve in his arm
and noting the return of sensation as it healed, uncovered
still more interesting phenomena. The experiment led him
to differentiate between two forms of sensation, protopathfc
(or pnmitive) and epicritic (or advanced). As the nerve
healed protopathic sensation first appeared; then epicntic
developed, repressing the older form. One does not develop
into the other: there is a dialectic ‘jump’.

Protopathic sensation was discovered to have a high
threshold. It was difficult to locate. When, for example m
the case of pressure, the high threshold was passed, quite
suddenly there was a sensation of acute discomfort, but
with very poor discrimination or locahsation. This ‘hit and
miss’ character of protopathic sensation, as of a man m a

185

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

rage swiping blindly at some unknown danger, had already
been found to be characteristic of thalamic function. Hence
Head and his followers connect pirotopathic or pnmitive
sensation with the thalamus, as representing a primitive
form of sensation, repressed by the evolution of the epicntic
system.

The epicritic system by contrast is more discriminating,
has a low threshold and does not suddenly pass into
acute discomfort. This is normal sensation as we experience
it.

It is therefore assumed that the cortex is part of the
epicntic system, and contrasts with the thalamus. It is
discnminating, it does not act rashly, in gusts, but according
to the situation. In Head’s view it is continually repressing
the instinctive activities of tlie thalamus, by cortical ‘back-
stroke’, and we may equate this cortical control, it is
suggested, with that rational consciousness we feel con-
trolling our actions in actual life.

The epicritic sensations are primarily exteroceptive — as
for example sight and hearing. The proprioceptive sensa-
tions may however be protopathic. As is well known, the
internal organs, bones, etc., are not sensitive; we cannot feel
our stomach or intestines move in peristalsis. Nonetheless
when a certain threshold is passed internally, we experience
a sudden agonising pain and a sensation of ‘structural dis-
comfort’, dull, heavy, and alarming. This kind of sensation,
as Head had already found, is characteristic of the proto-
pathic system before the epicntic sensation has manifested
itself. Presumably therefore internal sensation is still
largely thalamic. Again, when we are ‘thrown off our
balance’ by sudden gusts of rage, it is to be assumed that
cortical control has vanished temporarily and our behaviour
IS thalamic.

This dualism was not accepted without opposition. It was

i86

CONSCIOUSNESS

for instance criticised by neurologists of the standing of
Pizron. Nonetheless the general trend of research has if
anything confirmed Head’s distinction between cortex and
thalamus, although the sharpness of many of his defimtions
has been modified. As a result it is usual to schematise the
neurological basis of consciousness as follows* All sensation
comes via the nerve receptors to the thalamus, where it
would provoke instinctive ‘all-or-none’ reaction, were it not
for cortical control. It then passes on to the cortex, where it
emerges as conscious perception. Discriminative motor
habits arising out of this perception are assumed to be
lodged in the cortex, while the more instinctive motorisms
are located in the thalamus. Thus the general view is that
consciousness is primarily, if not solely, the activation of
sensation or motor traces in the cortex, and that all delicate
affective shades are similarly cortical. Thalamic activity, it
is assumed, is associated with unconscious or subliminal
perceptions and instinctive motorisms. All violent effective
outbursts, particularly severe pains, are assumed to be
thalamic. The thalamus is the rebel, the seat of the un-
conscious, the instinctive proletariat, which that well-
educated and refined bureaucracy, the cortex, with its
unemotional logical consciousness, keeps (not without
difficulty) in order.

At a still lower level is the bulbo-spinal system, concerned
with simple reflexes. This may be omitted from our discus-
sion for the moment.

Certain psychologists, such as Marston, have suggested
that consciousness is pnmarily a function of the synapses.
This however will not affect the present argument. Since
wherever there is a nerve connection there is a synapse, and
since no one suggested all synapses are simultaneously
active, the synaptic theory leaves it open as to which parts
of the nervous system are m fact concerned in consciousness.

187

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

In any case there are more synapses in the cortex than
elsewhere. Therefore it is fair to say that the view we have
outlined represents the trend of opinion, as far as there can
be such a thing, amongst modern neurologists. It will be
seen that it is still influenced by bourgeois biology. The
free instincts are controlled by the cortex. Experience
throttles unconscious hfe. Freedom is the uncohsciousness
of the necessity of reality, learned in experience.

It would however be just as accurate to picture the
thalamus as the organ of conscious instinct and the cortex
as the organ of unconscious thought. In either case we are
simply playing about with terms. Consciousness is not so
simple as that.

Cortical consciousness is equated in current neurological
theory with epicritic sensation. The essence of epicritic
sensation is fine discrimination. Thalamic sensation —
which is unconscious or- (as Rivers visualises it) repressed by
cortical control — ^is lacking in discrimination. Thus a light
touch on the skin, easily detected by the epicritic system, has
to be increased to a hard pressure before it is perceived by
the protopathic system, which then explodes affectively.

How does this theory square with the facts of conscious-
ness?

Few of the docrines of psychology receive more general
assent than that of subliminal impressions. Impressions
have to reach a certain threshold value before they are
consciously perceived. That such impressions, although not
perceived consciously, have yet left memory traces, i.e. have
been perceived unconsciously, is evidenced by the fact that
they can be recovered in hypnotic trance, when what is
loosely called ‘the unconscious’ is made accessible. The
phenomena of hypersesthesia are explained in this way.
Sounds, scents and cutaneous and visual discriminations not
normally in the conscious field, are made accessible by the

188

CONSCIOUSNESS

inclusion with the ego in hypnotic trance of a large part of
what is normally unconscious sensation. In the same way
shght impressions, separately unconscious, appear eventu-
ally by repetition to summate until they can nse above the
threshold of consciousness, when the ego then becomes
‘aware’ of the previous repetitions.

Now this at once raises the query, damaging for the usual
theory, why consciousness should show all the character-
istics of protopathic sensation — ^restricted field and lack of
fine discrimination — ^while unconsciousness proves itself
endowed with epicntic discnmination and range of sensa-
tion. Head’s view, as we have said, is that epicntic sensation
‘repressed’ protopathic sensation, or made it unconscious.
The facts concerning subliminal impressions, if vahd, con-
tradict it. They do not however prove the reverse, for Head’s
own expenments show that protopathic sensation can also
be conscious. The conclusion would appear to be that
consciousness has nothing to do with either epicritic or
protopathic sensation, nor repression with unconsciousness,
but that we must think along other Imes in order to under-
stand what the relations are.

Let us consider such a simple question as the ordinary
visual field, and its connection with degrees of consaousness.
It is well known that we do not regard the visual field as an
undifferentiated whole, but that different parts of it have
different values. This is expressed in the older theory of a
faculty of ‘attention’ (which, hke consciousness, has been
located in the cortex) and in the gestalt or ‘field’ theory,
which is really an elaborate attention psychology made
objective. Thus motion of objects attracts the attention to
them. We see interesting objects. A woman sees a bat; an
artist’s attention is caught by features of hght and shade
unnoticed to others; a detective sees a criminal face. We all
tend to see shapes in shadows, figures in clouds, to fiff out

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FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

and round ojff contrasts, according to the schemes made
clear by gestalt experiments. Attention is a name for the
actual element in perception ^

Now though we may say that all the visual field is ‘con-
sciousness’, It IS plain that different degrees of consciousness
range over the visual field. Thus the sportsman, watching
rabbits, sees a vague background with a very distinct brown
animal moving over it. Perceptually the rabbit is more
conscious to him than its surroundings, and more dis-
crimination is made as to size, markings of coat, and move-
ments in this rabbit. A botanist surveying the same scene
might however see nothing clearly except a flower in the
field.

Here is made plain the nature of the contradiction
between epicritic and protopathic sensations and conscious-
ness. Consciousness is at its highest point in the rabbit
region of the visual field to the sportsman Even the
beast’s whiskers are clear to his eye. Here sensation is
epicritic.

At the same time, in the rest of the visual field nothing is
consciously noted but a green blur. Here then sensation is
protopathic. But in both cases sensation is conscious. The
weaker conscious sensation is protopathic, the stronger epi-
cntic. If, however, the sportsman were to be hypnotised, our
knowledge of subhmmal perception compels us to believe
that we could recover, out of that green blur, details of per-
ception which the sportsman had not consciously experi-
enced. Thus here sensation, unconscious sensation, is epi-
cntic. Experiments with eidetic imagery seem to confirm
this view.

This compels us to suppose that consciousness, in its
vividness or degree or even actual existence, cannot be cor-
related with either epicritic or protopathic sensation. It can
however be correlated with what has come to be called

igo

CONSCIOUSNESS

interest or ‘attention’. Interest is an aflfective phenomenon.
Consciousness therefore is affective tone.

To return to another* feature of the cortex — ^the richness
and plasticity of its reactions. Man’s thought is almost
certainly more rich and plastic than that of any animal.
His range of memories, the subtlety of his discrimination
among them and his faculty of language with all the nchness
of content it involves, are outcomes of this. Consequently
we rightly regard the hypertrophied human cortex as the
seat of this pecuharly human nchness of association and
mental structure.

But when we come to consciousness, we find in it a
feature which is pecuharly uncortical — ^its thinness and linear
character. Consciousness is a one-track activity. Man can
normally only follow one tram of thought at a time, and
this train consists, even in the richest thinkers, of a succes-
sion of single images in the spothght of consciousness,
surrounded by a dim, half-conscious fuzz. None of the
nchness characteristic of human thought in the umversal, is
characteristic of consciousness in the particular. Everyone
knows we can only concentrate on one thing at a time.
Moreover the intimacy of the connection is shown by the
kind of inverse law it follows. The more conscious and
vivid the mental product, the more hnear and sparse its real
content* It does not seem poor to us, because of its vivid-
ness* The height of its consciousness seems to atone for its
simplicity; but still it is simple. The thing that ‘worries’ us
and demands all our attention, obliterates all other associa-
tions. The sight of one we love makes us ‘forget everything
else’. The approach of a mad bull blots out the rest of the
visual field.

But this IS very uncortical, for the cortex is by hypothesis
the seat of immensely complex motor kinaesthetic and sen-
sory co-ordmations. Consciousness appears unable to use

^ 9 ^

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

more than a few of these at a time; and the ncher it is, the
fewer they are. If we regard the human cortex, in a well-
educated person, as consisting of n poientiahties, conscious-
ness at any moment can only be concerned with a minute
fraction of n* The rest are unconscious. Therefore the
cortex IS pnmarily an unconscious rather than a conscious
organ. It is like a library of knowledge with only one owner.
Despite Its immense resources, the owner at any one instant
can only scan one word in one hne in one book, though
given time and opportumty he can read what he hkes and
find what he likes in the realm of human knowledge.

Therefore, cortical consciousness is really chiefly cortical
unconsciousness. The cortex is the great unopened dic-
tionary, the grand reservoir of the temporarily forgotten.
Consciousness in the cortex is the glowing of a few neurones
out of hundreds of millions — ^an exception, a tiny locahsa-
tion. Unless we thmk the unconscious of no importance,
we would do better to regard the cortex as the seat of un-
consciousness. This would give man a larger unconscious
than the beasts, but is not this just what we would expect —
is not the beasf s knowledge more at its instant command,
less influenced by memory and association and therefore by
the temporarily forgotten but recallable? True, though for-
gotten It IS recallable, but no one would restnct the name
/unconscious’ to the completely unavailable, for, if it is
completely unavailable, by no means can it be proved to
exist. We make therefore the suggestion that unconscious-
ness and not consciousness, is the distinctive feature of
man’s cortical outgrowth; and that this shows the weakness
of current distinctions between consciousness and un-
consciousness.

« « ^ «

These considerations suggest others. What governs the
tiny localisation of conscious hght m the vast Arctic night of

igs

CONSCIOUSNESS

the cortex? The feature of the cortex, histologically, is its
lack of diifferentiation. Each part is hke any other part.
The locahsations of speech and similar functions seem arbi-
trary. How much more arbitrary seems the local play of
consciousness.

What this suggests can be shown by analogy. In a net-
work of electrified wires we see, constant at one point, a
glowing ‘hot spot’. We might suppose either that this was
due to a blowpipe flame from outside, apphed to that spot,
or to a kind of local short due to the connections of the
wires.

If, however, we saw that the hot spot moved continually
about from wire to wire, we should infer, on the normal
pnnciple of induction, that there was some mobile outside
cause. Either the blowpipe flame was being moved, or there
was some switchmg apparatus contmually changing the
direction of the current. In either case, though the hot spot
was in the wire system, we should regard it as external.

In the same way, considering the moving spothght of
consciousness in the cortical hbrary, it seems that we must
regard its movement as due to some other cause, some
external switchboard. We have already correlated consci-
ousness, both m existence and vividness, with afiective tone.
Assuming that the thalamus is primarily concerned m
affective activity, the switching organ, directing conscious-
ness into the local cortical channel, must be thalamic. If
therefore anything has the nght to be called the organ of
consciousness, it would be the thalamus. But this agam
shows the inadequate conception of consciousness current m
psychology. A conscious thought is the affective ‘heating’
of a cortical trace. The greater the heat, the greater the
consciousness. The cortical trace is not the consciousness,
because the cortex is, by assumption, an enormous mass of
traces, all undifferentiated and all unconscious. The consci-

G ^93

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

ousness, if we must make a mere quality substantive, is the
affective heat, for that and that alone produces conscious-
ness. But actually to separate ajffect and idea is Anstotelean;
It is hke separating form and matter.

Our theory has certain analogies with the kinetic theory
of heat. The molecules correspond to the cortex. The
vibration of the molecules the consciousness. The perpetu-
ally boihng organ, selectively commumcating its vibrations,
is the thalamus. Its boiling is a reflection of the whole
relation between body and environment.

Since the orgamsm is a umty, consciousness must be
unitary in nature, and the more intense the vividness, the
greater the limitation of consciousness. It TS wrong, how-
ever, to equate this with a constant supply of conscious
energy, which must therefore be either deep and thin or
wide and shallow.

The reason for the limitations of content when vividness
is present must be sought elsewhere. Attention to externals,
i,e to objects in the visual or stimulus field, is characteristic
of all animals It is simply that activity which is regarded as
characteristic of life. Sensibility is a readiness to respond to
certain stimuli, which in itself imphes activity towards such
stimuh. Simple organisms respond to food particles in the
tactile field, higher animals to prey or mates or traces sug-
gestive of them m the visual field. Men notice a wider range
of ‘things’ and discnmmate more subtly, but always the
vivid conscious part of the visual field is something that can
awake their instincts, which m turn are defined as the
entities which are awakened by those particular stimuli.

Thus consciousness is simply a specific feature of sensi-
bihty, a form of behaviour. Sensibility involves on the one
hand an innate response to certain things and, on the other
hand, certain things in the environment to be interested m.
For example, in a unicellular organism, sensibility involves

194

CONSCIOUSNESS

the tendency to be irritated by contact with small round
objects (potential food) and also the small round objects at
any given moment in contact with the orgamsm.

This stimulus elicits the response, and there is no gulf, only
a matter of degree, between this simple manifestation of
irritability, and the sportsman with a tendency to be irritrited
by the rabbit and the presence of the rabbit m his visual
field, both making up the consciousness of the rabbit in all
its vividness.

True he is also conscious of the green blur which is the
rest of the visual field. But if an orgamsm is to be highly
irritated by all small round objects that are food, hke the
amoeba, it must be slightly irritated, as the amoeba is, by all
small round objects tactually presented. In the same way,
if the animal or the sportsman is to be irritated by the pre-
sence of prey in the visual field, if he is to ‘notice’ them, he
must be slightly nutated by the visual field as a whole and
always must be slightly conscious of it. In other words,
before we can become conscious of a thing, we must first
become unconscious of it. We must have awareness over a
wide general field.

It might be thought that the visual field, in its all mclusive-
ness, cannot be compared with an amoeba m tactile contact
with a hard object. But in fact, the visual field is an em-
pirical and exclusive construction. It neglects most of the
possible wave-lengths of radiation, ignores distant features,
and does not observe any molecular or atomic phenomena
or real movements above and below a certain speed. It is in
fact as much a concentration of interest as a protozoan’s
exclusive concern with small round objects. The protozoan’s
whole world is small round objects. Our visual field is
similarly limited to phenomena which, as we evolved, have
proved of interest to us, such as the common hght octave (in
colour).

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FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

An instinct is an innate response of a certain nature to
external or somatic stimuli, or both. We should not con-
sider an ammal as possessing mstipcts but only potential
instincts, just as the cortex as a whole is not conscious but
only potentially conscious. We should regard instinct only
as it appears in behaviour, as a response to some situation.
It is true that we should thus never get a pure instinct, for
the situation is always shghtly different and therefore even m
insects the behaviour is always shghtly different This is all
to the good.

This would simphfy the theory of mentation. Living
response or sensibility, including conscious mentation, con-
sists of potential instinct, which is the whole sum of inborn
responses to somatic stimuh or environmental stimuh. This
is a purely Active conception, but methodologically useful,
like the "genotype’ in heredity. Actually nothing is ever
known, either in behaviour or m consciousness, except
potential instinct reacting to its somatic or environmental
stimuli and being changed thereby. Where we part company
with the behaviourist, who does not recognise consciousness,
is that we recognise consciousness and include it as a form
of behaviour. Thus we regard the visual field as instinctive
behaviour modified by experience. It is the instinctive
response of the cortical and thalamic projective areas to
stimuh. The stimuh are to us so complex in the normal
visual field that we naively regard them as ‘all reahty’,
instead of just a selection from it. This brings conscious
perception within the field of causality. It determines and is
determined, and this we already know from quantum
physics. Observation is an active process — a return to
Cartesian theories of vision on a higher plane.

Instincts are modified m expenence. Some, hke those
of the insects, are only shghtly modifiable. Others, like
the dog’s food response or man’s various responses to

ig6

CONSCIOUSNESS

Stimuli, are capable of far more conditioning. This can be
regarded as an enriching or comphcating of them. Thus
the instinctive visual fie^d of the baby is modified, and made
richer and more discriminating, in the grown man. Innate
behaviour becomes in expenence complex behaviour. This
IS a simple dialectic law of development.

The visual field is a conditioned, instinctive response to
stimuh. "^here is a slight response to a large number of
stimuli^ which we may call simply vision This shght sensory
response guarantees the visual, aural or tactual field as a
whole. Under the influence of some more speciahsed innate
response — ^to prey, mates or danger — ^we notice more
eagerly, more consciously and more vividly some one object
in that visual, aural, or tactile field. We behave towards it
m a different way. The greater specificity of the response
makes us consider a unit instinct is at work, but this is only
a name for a consistent difference m behaviour towards a
class of objects. It is thus determmed also by the environ-
ment.

The hnear nature of consciousness, hmited in proportion
to its vividness, is therefore necessary. Instinct is action.
The efficiency of the body and its very survival can only be
secured by the fact that it acts integrally. The higher the
organism, the more true we find this integration of response,
a unity in diversity. Since consciousness is part of the com-
plete response, it must be aU of a piece with the rest of the
response, including the body’s overt action. This means we
must only see or think of those things most immediately
relevant to the instinctive action as a whole Thus the ten-
dency of the orgamsm to flee from danger ensures that,
when danger appears m the visual field, the orgamsm is not
conscious of Its tailor’s unpaid bill, what it ate for dinner
last week, or the infinity of the Umverse, but only of the mad
bull, and the nearest exit from the field, while at the same

m

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

time the body’s response is limited to visceral vaso-motor
constriction, emission of adrenalin into the blood from the
suprarenal glands, and rapid running movement with the
legs.

Plainly the ego, insofar as we regard it as the stream of
consciousness, is our name for this fact. The integrity of the
organism creates the ego, not the ego the organism.

The association of affects or emotions with the instincts
has always been puzzhng. The ‘instincts’ seem to give rise to
affects, and yet instinctive activity can appear without them.
Restricting ourself to the case of conscious perception of a
dangerous object in the visual field, we see that there are
two elements m the response — ^intra-somatic behaviour
(adrenahc secretion and so forth) — and extra-somatic
(running). The first assists the second. Vision is only
involved as a part of action, and is stripped of all but its
bare essentials for the purpose. Therefore the simpler the
extra-somatic response, the more ‘one-to-one’ its correspon-
dence with innate reflexes, the less the need for the activation
of the cortical traces of experience. Both affect and consci-
ousness are therefore functions of the complexity of the
potentially stimulating field, and its relation to the modified
reflexes of the organism.

Certain animals, for example the insects, in spite of
elaborate instinctive activity, are closely geared to an un-
varying chain. The sphex will sting only one species of wasp,
and only in a certain way. There is therefore in spite of the
complexity of the overt behaviour, a poverty of alternative
objects and a poverty of alternative behaviour. The cor-
respondence IS virtually one-to-one. We should expect such
creatures to experience no affects and no consciousness.
Stimuh and reflexes match perfectly and weave an almost
unvarying fabric.

Nonetheless v^e must regard consciousness as a matter of
igS

CONSCIOUSNESS

degree. Just as heat and cold are simply varying rates of
molecular motion, which we divide subjectively into ‘hotter
than ours.’ and ‘colder than ours.’ consciousness and
unconsciousness simply represent degrees of affective vivid-
ness Many states subliminal for us might well be blmding
consciousness for fishes. Even in insects there cannot be
anything hke perfect one-to-one correspondence of innate
instinct to stimulus. There is no absolute degree of consci-
ousness. It IS the ego that is conscious but the ego in turn is
composed of a series of experiences selected above a certain
indistinct threshold. Naturally, to this ego anything below
the threshold seems unconscious, but this is merely because
it IS the ego which is doing the description.

^ ^ Mlt m ^

The conception of a switchboard is often used for neural
operations. It seems less objectionable than most analogies,
for the neurone undoubtedly has junctions, and transmits
impulses along its length by means of waves of potential
difference. But it differs from a switchboard in having no
operator, a fact which causes psychologists to invent
instincts, consciousnesses, and egos which operate the
switches Perhaps the automatic telephone may eliminate
these mythical deities The brain is an extremely elaborate
automatic telephone system, in which the stimuli are the
subscribers dialling, m which the apparatus is modified by
experience, and in which the body is part of the system —
flesh, blood and all.

In all switchboard schematisations of the neural system,
the cortex is pictured as the seat of a highly competent
Postmaster-General, directing all the other chains of relays,
down to the humble reflexes m the basement. This P.M.G. is
usually equated with consciousness. Our hypothesis has no
use for this overworked official.

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

If we must personify, let us persomfy the thalamus, and
let us imagme it, at a primitive level, faced with the task of
making more epicritic its sensations, and its action more
discriminating. It will do so by manufacturing an intricate
system through which sensations and motor activities can
be relayed, sorted out, stored and recombined, and where the
increased complexity of the possible combinations will
make more epicritic the actions. In other words, the cortex
(if we must persomfy) is the servant of the thalamus rather
than the master. (But either picture is inaccurate.)

Any engmeer faced with the task of increasing the pos-
sible combinations of a given circuit — e,g, the number of
telephone numbers diallable — ^would at once see that some
‘hierarchy’ must be called for. A must control B and C; in
turn B will control D and E and C will control G and F, and
so on. Only in this way can umty of action as well as dis-
crimination, be secured. Yet it is just unity which is the
feature of consciousness, represented m the ego and its
linear form of thought. Hence for the arbiter or controller
of cortical activity, we must look to some concentrated
organ holding all the cortical threads in its hands. This
would be, for sheer mechanical reasons, the optic thalamus.

Consciousness streams on with different contents, yet we
feel there is an unchanging basis for it, sharing all experi-
ences ahke. This unchanging basis, this ego, is something
that has access to vast stores of experience, but itself main-
tains Its general pattern. This would correspond to the
thalamus, through which all active ingoing and outgoing
impulses pass, but which has itself httle mnemic grey matter.
The cortex on the other hand is highly mnemic.

Let It be understood that we do not regard consciousness
as exclusively thalaimc, or the ego as seated in the thalamus
and its outgrowths. This is to make the mistake of the
mythologists The thalamus, because of its strategic posi-

200

CONSCIOUSNESS

tion, IS the spear-point of consciousness. Consciousness is a
behaviour of the whole nervous system. It is one out of a
number of conditioned responses to stimuh.

Inhibition is a feature of consciousness but is not peculiar
to it The amoeba performs, m response to a given stimulus,
one out of several possible actions. The others therefore are
inhibited. The organism which runs m response to danger
inhibits other possible actions. The orgamsm which thinks
is innervating certain neurone groups, corresponding to
older motor and sensory groupings, and this constitutes a
thought or wish or feehng, one out of many possible, the
others being inhibited or unconscious.

Consider a defimte situation: There is a bull in the field of
vision. This stimulus, as a result of thalamic switching,
activates adrenal and visceral innervations, and produces a
general somatic readiness to make the fear-response. Owmg
to the nature of the situation— the choice of flight or fightmg,
and the different paths available for both — ^there is a good
deal of thalamic sparking among diJSerent possible muscular
reactions, and these thalamic sparkings correspond to fear-
consciousness. Some of the energy as a result of more
thalamic switching flows into the cortex, where it innervates
nerve groups corresponding to thoughts of danger, possible
paths, and vague remorse at having taken the wrong short-
cut — all glowing with the fear affect. No fear affect, no
consciousness of these thoughts.

Thus the conscious field consists of protopathic visceral
circuits, a mediating thalamic circuit, and an epicntic
cortical circmt. We cannot say that consciousness is located
exclusively in any one of these circuits. True, no one is
conscious without a cortex, but neither are they conscious
without a thalamus. All are concerned; all are integrated in
the one response to the stimulus; all combine to produce the
one conscious field.

G*

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FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

In this pressing danger, we might examine the bull more
closely. We then draw on the traces in the cortical retinal
area, to discriminate more closely the featuies of the bull.
Could it be pacified'^ Is it a large one? Could we side-step
Its charge'^ This more discriminating perception, m which
memory enters, is the thalamus drawing on the cortex for
information, or if we hke it is affectivity piling up and leak-
ing into other cortical areas.

We may visualise the bulbo-spmal area as the home of
innate reflexes which experience will not greatly change.
The cortex on the other hand is the place where all motor
and sensory expenences leave traces, which because of their
elaborate winng, will be more discnminatmg, more easily
spht up and more plastic and leainable than elsewhere.
Moreover since their knowledge will be required when
instinct has not a one-to-one correlation between stimulus
and response, it is precisely the cortical cells which will
receive the aflective glow of a ‘puzzled’ thalamus sparking
and trying various alternative lines. This emotion will
therefore be always associated with cortical contents, except
m se\ere pains or thalamic protopathic explosions. Hence
our mistaken belief that it is a matter of cortical ‘control’.

Rather is it a matter of cortical advice. The thalamus
might plead that it is only ‘human’ and cannot remember
everything, and neurologists would admit that its deficiency
m grey matter would explain its poor memory. Neverthe-
less, as a result of aeons of experience, with comparatively
little differentiation, it is a magnate of strong will and simple
notions. It has the mam pohey of the firm at its finger tips.
Such persons are normally put at the helm of power. At
Its service, however, it has a staff of experts, and in any
ordinary circumstance it consults them (thought). Natur-
ally, in view of their experience, it acts on their advice. The
body of experts might therefore claim that they control their

202

CONSCIOUSNESS

chief. Nonetheless the reahty of thalamic power is shown in
all emergencies calhng for instantaneous motor response of
a nature so simple that the thalamus has known it for
centuries The cortex is ignored. Again, if a complex
situation recurs, even the thalamic memory is sufficient to
deal with the situation. This is habit.*

Consciousness might be regarded as an affective light,
which plays upon cortical, thalamic, visceral and sensory
neurones f They ‘clump’ together and separate out. Hence
our elaborate classifications of conscious affects, feelings,
thoughts, memones and percepts — all purely bogus, if we
regard them as describing separate entities. Naturally a
cortical neurone, under affective activity, ‘feels’ different to
a visceral or sensory neurone, because it has a different
chronaxy, composition, architecture and mnemic past, but its
feelmg is pooled in the common structure.

If Marston is right, and consciousness is a synaptic
phenomenon, this would account for the variation of
affectivity. A simple reflex would not be conscious, because
the synapses are firmly ‘closed’. When however they are
open there is a sparking, which is an affect and goes to
compose consciousness. In protopathic systems a heavy
stimulus would be needed to open the somewhat ‘rusty’
synapses, but the spark would be correspondingly intense and

* There is no evidence to support the view that an habitual response
to a complex situation is dependent on ‘thalamic memory’ Rather
would the work of Pav‘ov’s school and recent expenence of head
injuries suggest that an mtact cortex is essential for this type of response
By contrast with the emergency situation descnbed above however such
a familiar situation will evoke a response with a minimum of affect and
consciousness — i e be another example of the role of the cortex as the
organ of unconsciousness. — B H K

t Cortical, thalamic, visceral and sensory neurones The meamng of
the passage is obscured by this classification, since sensory neurones are
both thalamic and cortical, and visceral are mamly thalamic What is
clearly intended however is a contrast between the cells of the cortex
and those of the evolutionanly older parts of the bram, including the
thalamus. — B H K

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FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

explosive. The smooth ‘frictionless’ synapses of the cortex
and epicritic sensory system open and close quietly. The
cortex appears to control and modify response as a whole,
because it forms a part of most circuits. It corresponds to a
capacitance effect in radio. There is no ‘seat’ of integration
in an organism. Integration, precisely because it is integra-
tion, is the function of the entire organism.

Directed thinking is an affective river in the cortex. All
thinking has a strong affective component, otherwise it
would not be conscious. Why (to take apparently the least
affective instance) do we turn over one of thousands of
possible mathematical problems? Because that one interests
us. Interest is nothing but affect.

The affective association of conscious ideas, rediscovered
by Freud and Janet, is not therefore odd, but the only
possible law of conscious thought considered subjectively.
Affects are the stuff of ideas. Association by contiguity is
meaningless neurologically. It explains association of ideas
by another idea, that of contiguity Needless to say ideas
whose original stimuli are spatio-temporally contiguous, are
likely to share the same affective tone, and as such are likely
to revive together. Given m every experience is a subject
and object. Association by contiguity is objective associa-
tion of experiences.

Whether it is the cat springing precisely on its prey, or the
mathematician solving a problem, the behaviour is the same
in pnnciple. First there is the tendency called forth by the
stimulus — the desire to solve the problem. Then the con-
formity of the behaviour with reality, that is the flowing of
the affective current of interest, by elaborate and tortuous
synaptic paths, among just those cortical cells which experi-
ence has shown to be necessary. The animal stalking its
prey, fatigued and stung by the brushwood, and the mathe-
matician, with wrinkled brow, solving the thorny problem,

204

CONSCIOUSNESS

are both exhibiting the same behaviour, except that the
ammaFs is overt, the mathematician’s intra-somatic. The
exultant pounce of the animal, fatigue forgotten, and the
joyful ‘Eureka !’ of the mathematician, his frown changing
to a smile, are evidences of similar terminations to the
transaction.

Sleep frees us from attention to present reahty. It inhibits
by closing the sensory roads (a patient with anesthesia of the
skin is hable to fall asleep at any moment). Since the cortex
is the great storehouse of memory, Le, of recent reality, it is
asleep- We never smell in dreams,* and smell alone of the
senses goes to the cortex without thalamic intervention. In
sleep, the ‘instinct’, or ‘innate tendency’ to conform to
reahty, which is simply the connection of the cortex to the
nervous circuit, is cut off. Our learning is forgotten. We
mould our thoughts hke a child. The thalamus reveals that,
without his advisers, he is in spite of his energy a savage.
The strongly visual character of dreams is presumably due
to the large retinal projection on the thalamus f The fact
that most dream contents can be referred to the previous
day, might be attributed to the unmnemic character of the
thalamus There may be some cortical activity in dream,
but the primitive protopathic character of dream sensations,
the indistinct faces, the condensation of images — which
would be characteristic of a non-discrimmating organ — all

* Smell in dreams This statement is controversial but if incorrect
does not vitiate the mam argument, since the rhmopalhum, or part of
the cortex which deals with smell, is much more akin to the thalamus
than other parts of the cortex.

t Thalamus and vision The thalamus was at one time known as the
optic thalamus, a misnomei since the fibres of the optic tract do not
relay in the thalamus. There are however other relay stations m the
optic apparatus which may play a similar role m regard to visual stimuli.
It IS obvious that dreams are not wholly explicable on the basis of
thalamic activity and that a cortical element must be assumed The
general argument, that in the dream state the role of the thalamus is
dominant, can however be supported — B H K

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FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

seem thalamic. Since we have not equated consciousness
with the cortex, the vividness and reality of dreams present
no difficulty. Dreams are the opposite to "deja vue"
phenomena, in which real percepts seem memoiies. In
dream, memories seem real percepts. The former some
psychiatrists attribute to thalamic inactivity, the latter
therefore we attribute to thalamic activity. By active and
inactive, we mean active and inactive relatively to the cortex.

Now all this is very well as far as it goes. We have tried to
join the two ends of mental and biological psychology. But
we reach a certain point with neurology, and then are up
against the difficulty that neurology is a branch of biology,
that outside stands the closed world of bourgeois physics,
and, arbitrarily planted on top of the closed world of
neurology, is the closed world of mentahsm, or bourgeois
faculty psychology. By the very definitions of bourgeois
psychology, we are forced to regard innervations and
thoughts, nerves and consciousness, matter and mind as
distinct classes of entities, mutually exclusive. Until
dialectical materialism has broken down this exclusiveness,
not only in psychology but in physics, biology, philosophy
and sociology, how can we begin to formulate a theory of
consciousness that will not be duahstic and strained*^

But we can perhaps indicate the road, starting from the
foundations. We must sweep away the concept of the bour-
geois m opposition to and separate from the environment.

In this Newtonian schematisation, the bourgeois and the
environment obey entirely different laws; the bourgeois
stops at his skin. The consciousness is ‘something’ that sits
inside, while outside ‘reahty’ raps on the nerve-endmgs in
code, which code is ‘interpreted’ inside the skin This is
precisely how Eddington formulates the situation, evidently
believing it to be the ‘scientific’ view
But m fact the bourgeois is only an organised whirlpool
206

CONSCIOUSNESS

of matter in his environment, constantly changing, con-
stantly being renewed. The consciousness is the orgamsa-
tion of a part of it, but the organisation is not separate
from the matter, hke a concept or universal. The matter is
organised The organisation is a quality of matter.

The Universe becomes. Not merely man becomes, but
change, motion and development are the law of the Uni-
verse. The Umverse does not change and become in Time.
Relativity and quantum physics clearly show that time is
the change, and the becoming. All phenomena A, B, and C,
etc. are connected so that A is included m B, B in C, C in
D, and so on. This inclusion in difference is Becoming,
development, and reality. This involves a substratum of
hkeness m the Universe, that which changes, that which is
the same m all change. This we abstract as space, as the
aspects of matter expressed in the conservation laws (mass,
energy, interval, action). This we regard as the stuff of the
Umverse This is what mathematics is concerned with, what
quantity is, what the basis is of all predictive laws of science.

But equally it involves a superstructure of unlikeness in
the Universe — the change as change, the difference in all
events. This we abstract as Time, as the qualities in matter
not obeying conservation laws (colour, consciousness,
beauty) This we regard as the aspect of the Umverse, pre-
cisely because it is the difference that interests us. This is
quality, the basis of all art and sensuous culture.

But any absolute dichotomy into reahty and appearance,
space and time, matter and motion, primary and secondary
qualities or object and subject, is erroneous and denies the
reahty either of change or of existence. Both are intimately
blended in becoming. It is not separate things that become
entirely in themselves, but the Umverse is one, there are
determining relations between all phenomena. These deter-
mining relations are the becoming. If any group were self-

20 ’/

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

determined, it would be unknowable and unknowing in its
relations to the rest, and would not therefore exist. The
Universe is a material unity.^

This is true, not merely of life but of all that is, from
consciousness to physics, and this guarantees that these
worlds cannot in fact be closed nor their laws remain un-
changed. And change, the increase in organisation, is
newness; it is what consciousness is. But we can never set
something aside, and say* This is entirely new, it has no old
in it — ^for that would be to separate something from the
Universe, to deny change and dichotomise becoming.

The hke, that which remains is, in the biological sphere,
instinct and habit and heredity. The unhke, that which is
new, is experience, knowledge and acquired characters.
Each generates the other in dialectic movement. In the
evolution of consciousness, instinct is experience, gives rise
to memory and affect, and is now no longer the old instinct.
We may lodge experience in the cortex and instinct in the
bulbo-spinal system, but both can only be separated in
abstraction. There is only bodily behaviour, that is,
material becoming in which body and environment are
involved.

Body and environment are in constant determining rela-
tions. Perception is not the decoding of tappings on the
skin. It IS a determimng relation between neural and
environmental electrons. Every part of the body not only
affects the other parts but is also in determining relations
with the rest of reality. It is determined by it and determines
It, this interchange producing development — ^the constantly
changing senes of interlocking events. A, B, C ... Of this
multitude of relations, spatio-temporal, perceptual and
mnemic, we distinguish a certain group, changing as the
world changes, not with it or separately from it but m
* This position IS fully slated in the essay Reality, see below, p 210

208

CONSCIOUSNESS

mutually determimng interaction with it. This selection,
rich, highly organised and recent, we call the consciousness,
or our ego. We do not select it out. In the process of
development it separates out, as hfe separated out, as suns
and planets, and the elements separated out from the pro-
cess of becoming. Separated out, and still changing, it is
consciousness, it is us in so far as we regard outselves as
conscious egos. But in separating out, it does not com-
pletely separate out, any more than any element did. It
remains, hke them in detemumng relation with the rest of
the Umverse, and the study of the orgamsation of this
developed structure, of its inner relations and the relations
of the system with all other systems in the Umverse, is
psychology— not bourgeois psychology, but the psychology
of dialectical materiahsm.

We can say that such a psychology will only purge itself
of the dualisms and anarchy of present-day psychology by
reahsing that it is the science of the mmds of men hvmg in
concrete society. These men are material bodies entenng
into social relations with each other and the rest of the
material umverse. This means the abandonment of the
mythical categories of bourgeois psychology, which has
proved itself unable to advance beyond the conception of the
abstract individual psyche, the self-consciousness of the
individual in civil society — ^m a society where the individual,
because society has not yet found itself, has lost himself.

2og

V

REALITY

A Study in Bourgeois Philosophy

I T has been obvious for some time that the world of
physics has been deviating farther and farther from the
world of perception. The world of physics is a world com-
posed of points and instants and lines, bare of quality.
Nothing in it can be felt, smelt, or seen. The world of rela-
tivity physics, which combines space and time, seems to
take us ever farther from reality as directly experienced.
How IS this, for physics is built up from the results of
perception"? The discrepancy between Newton’s and Ein-
stein’s theories was settled m favour of Einstein by percep-
tion — ^the Michelson-Morley experiment, the eclipse experi-
ment and observation of Mercury’s movements. The
peiceived world therefore is primary and gives status to the
various possible self-consistent logical worlds. The per-
ceived world is real Should it not therefore be possible to
express the world of physics in terms of less abstract entities?
Could we not make it sound like the real world"? That was
the goal of Whitehead’s method of Extensive Abstraction.

To take an example, space may be defined as built up of
points, and betweenness, a property of these points, and
these points may be defined m various ways. The Euclidean
method was to define a point as an entity having position
but no magnitude, which is obviously a thing never met with
m perception. Points may also be defined as the class of
ordered triads of real numbers with their signs, which seems

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REALITY

an even more remote definition but is, thanks to the develop-
ment of Cantonan transfinites, one which gives the required
properties of continuity to space Either definition is equally
satisfactory for develo|)ing a geometry.

Whitehead suggests instead that we should regard points
as of the class of ‘sets’ of volumes For example, the set of
concentric spheres converging in a hmit gives all the extensive
relations of a point. The intensive properties of such a set
are not what we might expect from a point, but the mtensive
relations of such entities do not concern us any more than
the interior of the earth concerns the map-maker. White-
head develops his theory with great logical skill. He treats
time in a similar way, using a class of overlapping events to
represent the ‘instant’ of older physics. Russell has a method
dijfferent m detail, but similar m principle.

Whitehead and Russell therefore make the curious
assumption that ‘volumes’ or ‘events’ are more gross, and
perceptually obvious to anyone than points or instants.
But a volume is an abstract idea. Our sensory surfaces,
with which we gam our knowledge of external reahty, are
all areas, not volumes, and the nerve endings are dotted
about this area, each ending providing a point of sensation,
which is a kind of minimum sensory datum. Thus sensa-
tion is, like mathematical space, built up of points, lines and
areas, and these are built up by experience into volumes.
Even a line or area will be explored by the motion of the
point nerve-endings over it. Points can therefore claim at
least as much concrete existence in perception as volumes.
True, physiological points, unhke geometrical points, have
magnitude, but it does not feel as if they had, because they
constitute a threshold. In any case, perceptual volumes
differ as widely from geometrical volumes as sensory from
geometrical points.

* V The Analysis of Matter.

2II

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

The perception of abstract volumes in fact require a high
order of sophistication. We never perceive abstract volume
without considerable education m abstractions. I doubt if
anyone even among painters, saw volume, until Cezanne.
Neither primitive man, nor the Bushman, nor the average
clnld, perceive volume in the abstract, if their paintings are
any clue. It is always stuff, voluminous things, vapour,
clouds, mass, that we perceive. Matter is perceptual;
volume is not.

But I am even more critical of the assumption that it is
only from what we perceive that physical abstractions are
built up. On what grounds can this be justified? It is I who
expenence. My conscious world is filled, not only with
things, volumes, points, but with desires, hopes, and
memories. Why must these be omitted'^ Why do those very
philosophers such as Kant, Whitehead and Russell, who
hold the egoistic components of the conscious field to be
primary, demand that physics be built up out of secondary
entities?

They do so because the bourgeois philosopher cannot
help producing this dualism, and yet he remains unconscious
of its source. It is not Berkeley who fights mechanical
matenahsm, but Berkeley who generates it. Condillac does
not refute solipsism, he produces it. Hume does not dis-
solve the causal world of physics in which atoms move
according to the foresight of a divine calculator, on the
contrary, it is Hume who calls such a parody of reality into
existence.

Given in reahty is subject and object No sphere of
reality is absolutely self-determined, for if it were it would
be unknowable, and therefore would not exist. Between
subject and object exists a network of relations, including
the conscious field. Since no part of reality is isolated, this
conscious field must directly or indirectly have determining

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REALITY

links with every part of reahty. Since reahty is becoming,
subject to endless change, this conscious field may continu-
ally increase in size and still more intricately develop mside
reahty.

Because it is a relation or sum of relations the conscious
field ‘contains’ (or has as terms) both subject and object,
by whose interaction it is generated. Now in the analysis of
this field there are four alternatives.

(a) We may sort tljis bunch of relations, each of which
has the form s-o (subject related to object), on the
assumption that o depends on s, which is self-determined.
We then get a world of phenomena in which everything
known is generated by the subject or ‘F, which is therefore
primary. This of course is solipsism.

(b) We may sift through all these relations on the as-
sumption that s depends on o, which is self-determined. We
then get a world of phenomena in which everything known
is generated by the object or ‘external’ world, which
IS therefore pnmary. This is mechanical materiahsm.
Either point of view lands us in difficulties. If the subject

is self-determined, how does it come into existence‘s If the
object IS self-determined, how does it come to be known's
If all relations (i.e. qualities) are not completely real but
only one term is real and the other dependent and secondary,
what m fact are the real parts of qualities? Whether we
adopt position (a) or (b) we reach the depressing conclusion
that no qualities are really real. If we are physicists, and
our programme is to confine ourselves to qualities indepen-
dent of the subject — objective facts — v/e soon find that the
observer is involved in all such quahties as colour, smell,
taste Further research, such as that of relativity physics,
shows us that the observer is even involved m such appar-
ently objective quahties as size, shape, mass, motion, time,
distance. In all such qualities the observer must be specified.

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FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

We finally get nothing absolute but mathematical equations,
Y/hich express only the comparability of these qualities
among themselves, and are therefore purely metrical. But
mathematical equations are thoughts, they do not exist
concretely. We are therefore back at a completely subjec-
tive world, having started out in pursuit of a completely
objective world

(b) If we are philosophers, instead of physicists, and our
programme is to confine ourselves to quahties independent
of the object — the geneial truths achievable by ‘pure’
thought — ^we soon find that the object is involved m all such
apparenty subjective quahties as causality, perception,
thought. We finally get nothing absolute but Umversals,
or concepts such as Whiteness, Truth, and the like. These
concepts must however exist independently of the thinker’s
brain, for this brain is a particular object. These Umversals
must one by one be stripped of all the distinctions that arise
from particularities, and thus we are left with nothing but
the laws of the comparabihty of Ideas among themselves,
m other words, with logic. We get a world in which the
sole realities are Ideas or Umversals existing independently
of the thinker according to logical laws — the idealism of
Hegel. But such a world exists independently of the subject.
We are therefore back at a completely objective world,
having started out m pursuit of a completely subjective one.
And we are all ready to start out on another circle.

Like Fabre’s processionary caterpillars on the rim of a
jam jar, we can walk that circle again and again, the most
dreary captivity of thought. It is one that every philosopher
has hitherto been doomed to tread, and now bourgeois
physics is treading it too. It is the circle of thought divorced
from action the cage of pure reason.

(c) No attempts to heal the duahsm by combining the
two positions have been successful. Any such compromises

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REALITY

forcibly fly apart. The simplest compromise, that of Hume,
Kant, Mach, Avenarms and the neo-reahsts, is to assert that
phenomena (or sensa) are primary, that is, exist by them-
selves. But it IS impossible to carry through such an argu-
ment logically, for the phenomena become completely law-
less, they are simply a heap of relations, which we can take
any way Imagine a fabric being spun by a loom. If we smp
the threads close to the shuttles, the whole weaving process
becomes confusion, there is no pattern How can colour
generate size, size beauty, or beauty logic without the basis
of the material object or subject? Such a world is not a
subject either of discussion or thought, it is a mere chance
collocation The laws of science or thought are then simply
convenient methods of enumerating these phenomena. One
method is as good as another. There is no question of
differing degrees of truth or reality. There is no meamng in
the query whether one statement is truer than another The
most that can be claimed is that one is more economical —
but it may be economical of paper, breath, thought, or
bodily energy, and therefore m a paper shortage science
might be completely transformed in all its hypotheses This
is not irony, it is a true statement of the Machian-Kantian
position. A diagram may illustrate the problem.

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

The centre disc, A, is the subject. The outer disc B, is the
object. The threads represent the relations between them,
or the phenomena. The whole system is the developing
Universe. The pattern is all formed by one thread which,
running through every hole, weaves the continuous intricate
system. By declaring that only phenomena are real,
phenomenahsm, in all its forms, snips off these threads at
the holes, and it is now no longer possible to understand the
laws of their spacing, tension, or interweaving.

Not all relations are known, and conscious, but by follow-
ing the endless thread, we come on new relations. We follow
its course by means of action to change the object whose
results, summarised in scientific laws, express objective reahty
in terms of thought and are able to predict the course of the
thread. Thus phenomenalism (positivism) is anti-scientific,
for it gives us no reason to suppose that the Universe of
phenomena need be linked by any relations. On the con-
trary such relations are declared to be unknowable. The
linkage is provided by the material basis of phenomena, and
positivism denies the knowability of this matter.

So clear is this diflBiculty, that positivism is never carried
out thoroughly to the end. In Kant’s critical idealism, the
object is smuggled in as the unknowable thing-m-itself, and
the subject as ‘the categories’. In Mach the unknowable
Dmg-an-Sich reappears, but the subject is now smuggled in
under the form of the ‘most economical laws of thought’,
the subject being the judge of economy.

Phenomenahsm does not therefore, as was supposed by
the critical idealists, the positivists, and the neo-realists,
reconcile the duahsm of subjectivism or objectivism. It
cannot in fact exist for a moment as a system, and either
one or both positions have to be smuggled in, so that the
system, as it develops, becomes either subjectivism or
objectivism, or yet another nominal alternative. If a relation

216

REALITY

between two terms exists, i.e. if the reality is A plus B, it is
possible to take either A, or B, or (and this is the position of
phenomenahsm), we may take the plus alone, and claim
to be reconciling the’ duahsm. But of course we are
not. We are forced m practice to join one party or the
other.

(d) The final alternative is to omit the plus altogether.
How then explain the knowledge by B of A, and the effect
shown by A of B’s actions upon A. By something that is
neither B nor A, something that is outside reahty — i.e. God.
This is the philosophy of Descartes and Leibmtz Spmoza’s
system has certam affinities with it, and chiefly differs in its
resolute momsm. According to such philosophers A and B
function entirely separately, and the congruity of these
functioning — Man knowmg the world by thought and the
world showing traces of Man’s action on it — is explained by
the fact that they were arranged beforehand by God, hke
elaborate mechanisms, so to run in time. In such a world,
if the system is consistently earned out, no quahties are
real, for neither subjective (mental) quahties, nor objective
(material) qualities are primary. All are generated by God.
The only real quahties therefore are the absolute quahties of
theology — Ommscience, Omnipotence, Perfect Love, and so
forth. Man and the world of colour, hope, and hfe are
sim ply a shadow-show. But just as the stripping of the
subjective element from objective quahties reduces them to
mere equations, and the reverse process reduces them to
logic, so the elimination of both subjective and objective
elements in the qualities of a world from which the relations
have already been excluded, leaves us with nothing but the
fact that these elements are produced by an unknown out-
side term, or ‘First Cause’. Even the theological attributes
of God vanish, and we have only the uncaused Cause—
another name for the self-determmed primary term, which

2iy

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

was given in our premises. We simply take out again the
empty thing we put in.

Why does thought torment itself with this duahsm,
selecting every possible combination, yet thrown always
back upon itself^ And what is the solution‘s The second
question will be answered first. The solution is dialectical
materiahsm Dialectical materialism goes behind subject
and object to the material basis from which their antagonism
arose.

(e) A and B, and the relations between them, are all real.
The Universe is one, and is as a whole absolutely self-
determined, but no part of it is absolutely self-detei*mined.
All that IS real exists, and all that is real is determined, that
is, every part of the Universe is in mutually determining
A-B relations with the rest of the Universe. Everything
therefore is knowable, for the meaning of knowable is
simply this, the possibility of expressing a determining rela-
tion between that unknown but knowable thing, and a thing
already known. This possibility is given in our premises.

This is our premise that the Universe is a material unity,
and that this is a becoming.

This material unity of becoming cannot be established by
thought alone. It is established by thought in unity with
practice, by thought emerging from practice and going out
into practice. Phenomena are exhibited by the thing-m-
itself, and if we can by practice force the thmg-m-itself to
exhibit phenomena according to our desire, then we know
this much about the thmg-m-itself— that in certain circum-
stances it will exhibit certain phenomena.

This is positive knowledge about the thing-m-itself.
When we can in practice achieve all possible transfonnations
we have all possible knowledge about the thing-in-itself.
Thus we prove that the universe is a material unity by
proving in practice the material basis of all phenomena.

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REALITY

This material basis is the thing-in-itself, or the like content
of any phenomena exhibited by the thing-m-itself. This
proof of material unity is secured by change and is therefore
a process of becoming^ of differentiation, of the emergence
of the new. But it is a proof of unity, of the sameness,
likeness, or determinism in all phenomena.

The point is to change the world, not to interpret it.’
For it IS not possible to interpret the world, except by chang-
ing it. Thus the impasse of philosophers is seen to be the
impasse of philosophy, and a proof of the impossibihty of
interpreting the world by thought alone.

A-B do not exist as eternally discrete entities. The
Universe is a becoming, a development. The becoming is
primary. Reality does not become in time and space, but
time and space are aspects of its becoming. Beconung is
change. If a thing is changed, it manifests an unhke, a
hitherto non-present quahty. If change is real, and by our
premises it is primary, such a quahty does not come into
existence either by the gradual decrement of a known
quahty to nothing, or the gradual increment of a very faint
quahty to something. Before, it was not, not in any way.
Now it is, in every way. There has therefore been a "jump’.
To deny this is to deny the reahty of change, and to suggest
that the quahty was already there, but so faintly we did not
"notice It’. But nothing new would then have come into
being. There would therefore have been no change, and
reahty is, by our defimtion, change

Although such a quahty is new, it is not arbitrary, i.e.
absolutely self-determined. By definition the Universe is
one. A quahty that is self-determined is, as we saw, un-
knowable. Therefore each new quahty, as it leaps into
existence, is determined by all qualities up till then present
in the universe.

These qualities do not come into being in time. Time does

2ig

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

not flow on while they emerge. The emergence of such
qualities is what time is. Time then is an aspect of, or
abstraction from, change. Time is new quality as it emerges.

But change does not merely involve the coming into
existence of qualities. If we find different qualities lying
about, even though they mutually determine each other, we
cannot say ‘something has changed’. The qualities may be
qualities of different things, and so there will have been no
change. There must therefore be something m all quahties
that remains the same, even though these qualities are new,
otherwise we cannot say, the ‘Universe has changed’.
There must be something hke in all unlikes. Otherwise we
could say, ‘these unlikes are not changed things, they are
dijferent things. We have not moved in time, but m space.’
How else can we distinguish motion in time from motion m
space, unless time is not something in which things change,
but the change itself?

But if the newness of quality, the unlikeness, as it emerges,
IS time, the oldness, the hkeness, is space Qualities do not
arrange themselves homogeneously in space, space is the
homogeneity in their qualities. Space is quantity or known
quahty as it remains unchanged; it is therefore the thing-m-
itself, the material unity of the Universe. The Universe is a
spatial Universe. Space therefore is an aspect of matter,
which is precisely what relativity physics has established by
practice. Mass-energy, or the likeness in phenomena,
generates space. This is established by practice.

All laws of development, of evolution, of difference, of
quahty, of aesthetics, of consciousness, are temporal. All
laws of conservation, of metrics, of comparabihty, of uni-
versal and unchanging relations, are spatial. ^

But time and space are only aspects of becoming or
change. If we could completely abstract time or space, and
divide relations into a set entirely temporal, and a set

220

REALITY

entirely spatial, we should have two absolutely self-
determined spheres, contradicting our premises for each
sphere would be unknowable to the other sphere. Therefore
no absolute time or space, as premised m Newtoman
dynamics, exists We know both time and space and prove
this by their mutual convertibility, by the change of quahties
and the reproduction of quantities.

Neither does an absolute spatio-temporal continuum
expressible in purely metrical terms exist. Such a continuum
would after all be purely spatial, for it would be expressible
entirely in terms of quantity. It would be self-determined,
and independent of all quahty. It would therefore be un-
knowable to quality, and quality would be unknowable to
it. Hence Einstein’s relativity physics still contains an
illegitimate absolute, which accounts for its being irrecon-
cilable with quantum phenomena.

We take as our premise ‘becoming’, the becoming of a
material unity which is generated by our transformation of
matter. Becoming, which involves change, which involves
like and unhke, involves also development. If we had no
develolpment, we would have no ‘becoming’. In develop-
ment there is a relation between the quahties A, B, C, D, E,
which is not only mutually determining, but such that A is m
some way contained in B, B in C, C m D, and D m E, but not
E in D, D in C, C in B, B in A. This relation, which is
technically called ‘transitive but assymetncal’, is involved in
^ process of becommg, just as are the existence of hke and
unlike. If becoming were otherwise, if quahties could not
all be ranged in this umque order, we should come upon
groups of quahties such, for example, that A would be con-
tained in B, and then B in A, or in some other way there
would be a ‘break’, or return to a quahty in which all the
new quahties of the intenm no longer appear. But such a
return is indistmgmshable from the previous situation, and

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FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

therefore we no longer have a process of becoming, but of
unbecoming. Moreover the relation of containing and
being-contained is, in development,^ mutually determining
If therefore the senes of quahties (or events) in any way
returns on itself m this fashion, the Universe splits in two ‘in
time’. We have two or more sets of self-determined qualities,
sufficient to themselves, each unknowable and non-existent
to the other.

We now see that the determination of qualities as they
appear is a relation of a special sort. It is a transitive
assymetiical relation known as ‘cause and effect’, in which
one quahty mutually determines another in a way which
may be described as the containing (or sublation) of one
quality in another. And all qualities (or events) may, by
this means, be ranged m a unique order.

Moreover since no set of qualities is self-determined, we
can never have a set of distinguishable qualities such that A
alone determines or is contained in B; B alone determines or
is contained m C, and so on, otherwise the series A, B, C,
would be self-determined and unknowable. This would
only be permissible if this series were the Universe. But we
do not regard the Universe as composed of one event at a
time. We do not believe that, whatever cross-section we
took of the mass of qualities that we call the Universe, we
would reveal over all the sections one quality only. If we
could do that, space would then be separable from time,
and we could collect spatial and temporal qualities m sei6=^
determined sets, which is contrary to our premises and
experience. This cross-section would correspond to a
umversal or absolute present, which is permitted to New-
tonian dynamics but is rightly eliminated from relativity
physics.

Since then this series is impermissible, the qualities are
always arranged as follows* A and A^ contained in B. B and

222

REALITY

Bi, contained in C, and contained in Bj. The only
arrangement which will now completely satisfy all our
premises is that each new quahty, as it emerges, is deter-
mined by another quahty (subject or antithesis) and the rest
of the Universe (object or thesis) This does not apply
merely to the qualities of cognition but to all events. In
older formulations of causahty, it would be stated that each
‘event’ (new quality) has a ‘cause’ (prior quahty) and a
‘ground’ (the rest of the Universe) The ground is currently
omitted for reasons of economy. For example, we say a
bell IS the cause of a sound. The air, earth, fixed stars must,
however, be as they are in order for the bell to produce the
sound. Any general scientific law must contain Universal
constants. This is recognised by modern relativity physics
(p) and quantum physics (h).

This then leads to the dialectical law of becoming, applic-
able to all quahties, that is, to all events. Any new quality,
as it emerges, is determined by (or ‘contains’) a prior quahty
(the cause) and the rest of the Universe of quahties. Or,
more strictly — since becoming its logically prior to time and
space — the two terms determining a quahty, {a) the prior
quahty and (i) all other determimng quahties, are to that
quahty cause and ground, and contain its past time and its
surrounding space. All other quahties not contained m this
way, are part of its effect, and contain its future time. It is
this relation which enables us to settle causahty and time
.-^nd space, which are never absolute, but relative to a quahty.

Logically we express this as follows. Every new quahty
(B) is the synthesis of an opposition between (A) the cause,
pnor quahty or thesis, and its negation (not-A), or
antithesis — the rest of the Universe of quahties existent in
relation to A. This dialectical movement does not take place
in Time and Space, but Time and Space are abstractions
from it.

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

Thus time not only is an abstraction of the unlikeness in
in qualities, but is also and therefore the abstraction of the
assymetncal relations between them which leave time open
and ‘infinite’, and make its process and its arrangement
unique, so that we cannot conceive the past in the future, or
yesterday to-morrow, or ourselves going backwards in time
To go backwards m time would be to shed those quahties
which contain the past, layer after layer, till we reach the
past. But all that retraced ‘shed’ past, now no longer being
in determining relations with the past-become-present,
would cease to exist, and we should not have gone back-
wards in time. Or to go backwards in time would be to come
again on to the quahties of the past which, contained in the
present, now also contain the present, so that we revolve in
a self-determined circle like a needle stuck in a gramophone
record, and can therefore know nothing outside that circle,
either past or future. We and the ‘outside’ would be
non-existent to each other.

Space IS not only an abstraction of the likeness in quah-
ties, but it IS also and therefore an abstraction of the sym-
metrical relations between them which make space closed
and finite, and makes its process and its arrangement non-
unique, so that we cannot conceive one part of space being
different from another part, nor our being unable to retrace
our steps over any distance we have traversed, just as we
cannot conceive one part of time being like another part,
nor of our bemg able to go back over any portion of time-'
we have traversed For if the qualities A, B, C, D, and E are
assymetrically transitive, so that A is contained in B, B in C,
and C m D, and D in A, there is a common relation to all
events — ^in this particular senes it is A, for if A is in B, and
B is in C, and C is in D, and D is in E, A must
be in E. A therefore is the spatial relation or hkeness in
development. It is that which develops, just as the

SS4

REALITY

unlike elements are the qualities exhibited by it in its
development.

Every quality is an event; every event is a quality. Every
quality of event is a relation between the subject A, and the
object not- A— the rest of the Universe. The simplest quality
(or event) is a quantum, in which there is a relation between
the electron A, and the rest of the U inverse not- A. Relations
peculiar to A and general to the Universe must therefore
both figure in the complete specification of a quantum. A
quantum is the most temporal quality we can abstract, just
as the interval is the most spatial.

Development does not take place in time and space.
Development, becoming, and change, secrete time and
space Time and space are abstractions of it. Memory
exhibits the assymetrical transitive relations we have men-
tioned, so does experience. They are therefore more
concrete, nearer to reality and to becoming, than abstract
time or space, or even the abstract spatio-temporal con-
tinuum. Learning, growth and evolution are not qualities
absolutely peculiar to life; they are what we call becoming in
its living aspects. Becoming includes both spatial finity and
temporal infinity.

We now see that there is a universal dialectic of reality,
a mode of movement which is prior to time, space, life and
all other events and qualities. This dialectic proceeds as
follows. First we have a quality. But a quality is a relation
between subject and object, between A, subject, and not-A,
the rest of the Universe. But the rest of the Universe not-A,
has as its object A, to A it is subject and to it A is the rest
of the Universe. The most ‘primitive’ quality we take there-
fore has two terms and a relation, this relation is involved
in ‘becoming’ and ensures that the process of reality is open
and ‘infinite’ at both ends.

Our most infinite regress into the past brings us therefore

H SS3

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

to a quality, to an event. We cannot imagine anything
simpler, for such a simplex one-term thing would be
absolutely self-determined and could not be known-by-us,
since knowing is a mutually determ'ming relation between
us and the thing. Any known event is already a quality, is
already a subject-object relation. It already involves within
itself an antagonism which can generate the means by which
it IS known.

We may take either term as primary and the other as
dependent on it. Since we can take either term as primary,
neither can be primary. They may be regarded as simul-
taneous But they are not independent terms, for they are
connected by a relation. The simplest quality therefore
reveals itself as a subject-object relation. But the process of
becoming involves that a new quality emerges (or event
occurs) not by the increment of something already there, but
abruptly, exhibiting something altogether unlike. But it also
involves that this new state contains the first old quality in
addition to the unlike new. This new state or quality is also
analyseable as a two-term relation, and must m turn be
succeeded by a new quality.

In other words, the fundamental mode of motion is a
state, revealed to contain a thesis and an antithesis each of
which IS all that is not the other (are opposites), and yet
neither are self-determined but are on the contrary, in
mutually determining relation (unity of opposites). This is
the thesis and antithesis. This state must give place to
another, containing both the old quality (A and B) and yet
an unlike element C. This is the synthesis. This quality,
when it reveals its dualism, no longer reveals the dualism
A and B, for this dualism parted between it (relation of
subject to rest of Universe) the whole of reality. There is now
newness, so therefore the same portioning o^ reality can no
longer reveal the same dualism. The old dualism is therefore

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‘reconciled’ m the new synthesis C, which itself however can
now be analysed as a two-term relation, the foundation of
another movement

Quantity is the coniparison of qualities among them-
selves. For this to be possible, they must all have a common
element of likeness. Yet this likeness, constantly, by the
dialectic movement, gi\es birth to the new. Quantity
becomes quality, yet remains quantity. This movement
guarantees the determinism of becoming, but not its pre-
determinism. The predetermimsm of becoming is a night-
mare ansing from mechanical materialism.

This movement is not imposed on becoming by thought.
It IS the only way becoming can really become, conformably
to our reason and experience; and it is in our reason because
our experience is part of this becoming. This movement
contains within it time and space, memory and perception,
quahty and quantity, all of which entities are abstractions
from it Time is the difference between synthesis and the
preceding relation, space is the similarity between them.
The dialectic movement of the Umverse does not occur in
space and time, it gives rise to them. The external world does
not impose dialectic on thought, nor does thought impose it
on the external world. The relation between subject and
object, ego and Universe is itself dialectic Man, when he
attempts to think metaphysically, merely contradicts him-
self, and meanwhile continues to live and experience reahty,
dialectically.

Knowledge of reality can only be generated when subject
and object attack each other dialectically, each changing the
other in the process. The change of the object is man’s
transformation of nature. The change of the subject is
knowledge. Thus dialectical materialism heals the subject-
object duahsm, not by denying one (idealism or mechamcal
matenalism) or both (positivism) but by making this

22y

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

antagonism the creative source of knowledge, as an active
relation in which both man’s theory and practice are
generated.

We thus see that the duahsm that torments philosophy,
the duahsm between the mmd and nature, between the
subject and object, between the ego and the external world,
IS the analysis of a quality, or the two-term relation, which is
not umque to mind but part of the process of becoming
The same dual relation describes the relation between a
quantum and its surroundings. We make the problem
needlessly difficult by making our ‘A’ term, not any par-
ticular human brain but men’s brains m general, and
‘not-A’ not Nature at any particular time but nature
throughout the past The dialectic relation still retains its
essential form, but is difficult to analyse fruitfully. It is quite
legitimate to do this, but it is simpler to take one human
brain in particular, or even a particular set of relations such
as perception. The basic dialectic remains the same, and
the analysis is now simpler.

The question of which is first, mind or matter, is not
therefore a question of which is first, subject or object.
Every discernment of a quahty (mind, truth, colour, size) is
the discernment of a two-term relation between a thing as
subject and the rest of the Universe. Mind is the general
name for a relation between the human body, as subject, and
the rest of the Universe. The human body is a general name
for a relation between the rest of the Universe, as subject,
and the mind, as object. Mind is a loose name for such
relations holding with all such human bodies (or including
perhaps the bodies of animals) just as body is a loose name
for such relations holding with all minds. Going back in
the Universe along the dialectic of qualities we reach by
inference a state where no human or animal bodies existed
and therefore no minds. It is not stnctly accurate to say

2s8

REALITY

that therefore the object is prior to the subject any more
than it IS correct to say the opposite. Object and subject, as
exhibited by the mind relation, come into being simultane-
ously. Human body, mind, and human environment cannot
exist separately, they are all parts of the one set. What is
prior is the material unity from which they arise as an inner
antagonism.

We can say that relations seen by us between quahties in
our environment (the arrangement of the cosmos, energy,
mass, all the entities of physics) existed before the subject-
object relationship imphed m mind. We prove this by the
transformations which take place mdependent of our desires.
In this sense nature is prior to mind and this is the vital sense
for science. These quahties produced, as cause and ground
produce effect, the synthesis,, or particular subject-object
lelationship which we call knowing. Nature therefore pro-
duced mind. But the nature which produced mmd was not
nature ‘as seen by us’, for this is importing into it the late
subject-object relationship called ‘mmd’. It is nature as
known by us, that is, as having indirect not direct relations
with us. It is nature in determining relation with, but not
part of, our contemporary umverse. Yet, by sublation, this
nature that produced mind is contained in the umverse of
which the mmd relation is now a feature; and that is why it
is known to us.

Such a view of reahty reconciles the endless dualism of
mentahsm or objectivism. It is the Universe of dialectical
materialism. Unhke previous philosophies it includes all
reality; it includes not only the world of physics, but it
includes smells, tastes, colours, the touch of a loved hand,
hopes, desires, beauties, death and hfe, truth and error. In
such a view all things pass away, for all things must change,
and yet nothing passes away, for the past is sublated in the
future Such a world is finite and infinite, it contains both.

FURIHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

All Other philosophies split on this rock, that they contain
self-determined spheres of qualities, whether this be the
continuum of Einstein (for relativity physics is a philosophy)
or the world of Ideas of Plato, or the world of sensory data
of Berkeley, or the world of ''values’ of axiologists. But one
is then driven into the difficulty that here on the one side one
has a self-determined sphere of values, tensors, ideas, or
sensa, not in relation with all other nameable qualities on
the other side. Therefore one of these two spheres is primary
and real, and the other secondary and unreal, or not really
real. In the world of physics for instance, smells, colours,
hardnesses and shapes are not really real. But the reality of
dialectical materialism is competent to include all these
quahties as real, for all are in mutually determining relations
with each other. There is no closed world of art, physics,
morals, or mind. All these worlds are open, and are part of
the one causality and process; and of no quality must it be
said ‘this IS an appearance or an illusion’. Such a world
includes as real not only all truths, but all errors, yet error
remains opposed to and distinguishable from truth. Such a
world includes future and past, but the future remains
opposed to and distinguishable from the past.

Moreover, such a world of reality, although it contains
all qualities and all experience and has no closed parts, is
yet as a whole self-determined It requires for its movement
no unknowable forces, general indeterminism, or mysterious
gods. It is free in itself. Precisely because it contains jm
Itself no closed worlds and in it truth and error, being and
not-being, mutually determine each other, it is not itself
determined. Such a Universe is therefore monistic and
pluralistic, just as it is finite and infinite. Its future is not
fully predictable, because if the unlikenesses in qualities
were predictable, they would not be new. But its future is
fully determined, because if the quantities of the future

S30

REALITY

were not like those of the present it would no longer be one
Universe of becoming.

In such a Universe thought is real, it plays a real role, but
matter is re^l. Thougfit is a relation of matter; but the rela-
tion IS real, it is not only real but determmmg. It is real
because it is determining. Mind is a determmmg set of
relations between the matter in my body and m the rest of the
Umverse. It is not all the set, for not all the necessities
whereby my body and the rest of the Universe mutually de-
termine each other is known to me, not all my being is con-
scious being. In so far as these relations are conscious, I am
free, for to be free is to have one’s conscious vohtion, deter-
mine the relations between the Umverse and oneself. The
more these relations between my body and the Umverse are
part of my conscious volition the more I am free. These rela-
tions are necessary or determining relations. Freedom is
the consciousness of necessity.

This is the theory of dialectical materialism which is itself
the outcome of a dialectical movement. A philosophy is
generated m society and is therefore the outcome of a social
movement. The early mechamcal materialism of Descartes
and Hobbes, strengthened by Condillac and d’Holbach and
accepted as the official methodology of physics, produced its
opposite, ideahsm, and this reached its chmax with absolute
idealism. Absolute idealism is the apex of bourgeois
philosophy, and all succeeding philosophies are either pedes-
trian recapitulations of earlier philosohpies or simple
eclecticism. There has been no noteworthy bourgeois
philosopher since Hegel. For these two opposing bourgeois
philosophies, by their very contradictions, gave nse to their
synthesis, dialectical materiahsm. This was the outcome of
classical bourgeois philosophy. It synthesised these elements
not by a rigid formalism but by proceeding beyond philos-
ophy, by becoming a sociology and exhibiting how both

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FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

mechanical materialism and objective idealism were gener-
ated, as a social product, m social action upon reality
through economic production.

Dialectical materialism was itself an outcome of the
contradictions of capitahst economy. When communism
and dialectical materialism emerged, all the discoveries of
bourgeois science that made such a view of the Universe
necessary now began to distort the framework of bourgeois
culture, so that it could no longer hold the forces it had
generated and bourgeois theory became a brake instead of
an aid to action and discovery. Relativity and quantum
physics, experimental psychology, evolution and genetics,
anthropology, comparative religion, are a few of the disrup-
tive forces in modem culture, which necessarily give rise to
semi-dialectical philosophies, to incomplete attempts at
synthesising the anarchy of bourgeois thought. The
characteristic of the relation of bourgeois theory to practice
m science is, that the more general the theory, the more it is
a hindrance to practice; the more detailed and particular it
IS, the less it acts as a distorting force.

« m «

Neo-Reahsm (or neo-Platonism) is, in its various forms,
but a late development of phenomenalism or positivism.
Concepts of ‘organisation’, entelechy, closed spheres of value
and the like, merely represent the veering of positivism
towards objective idealism and mentahsm. It is easy enough
to see that such philosophies do not heal dualism, and do not
give any thorough-going reahty to all classes of experience.
Whitehead, Russell, the gestalt psychologists, Eddington,
Jeans, Broad, and the many others only differ in their capaci-
ties for logic, or the narrowness of their aims and content It
is not really possible to sit on the fence m bourgeois duahsm.
Sooner or later one finds oneself on one side and to-day that

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REALITY

side is always idealism, never mechanical matenalism. Of
course such late bourgeois ideahsm has never the scope or
coherence of Hegehan Ideahsm, just because all the old
confidence has gone. The bourgeois no longer really believes
in himself or his theory.

Morgan and Alexander may be bracketed as leaders of a
popular philosophy which really found its pioneer in
Spencer and its most subtle exponent in Bergson. Impressed
by the fact of biological evolution, a concrete proof of the
transformabihty of matter, that life has a dialectical history,
such philosophers attempt to forge a dialectical ‘theory of
life’ which takes the following form; New unpredictable
quahties appear as jumps. Thus, ‘hquidity’ represents one
jump, ‘hfe’ another, ‘mind’ a third, and so forth. These
quahties emerge.

Such a philosophy collapses, however, because these quali-
ties, or jumps, are imposed. They do not result from quah-
ties which are two-termed relations, whose terms, by their
repulsion, created the synthetic quality that ‘emerges’.
Mind is a simple one-term quahty without relation; such
quahties are not therefore after all real. In spite of the
desperate attempts of such philosophers to save sensory
data, sensa remain secondary and unreal Moreover time
and space are not the dialectical change. They are (accord-
ing to Alexander) the matrices m which the change
takes place. As with Plato, space is the womb of all
becoming.

' Thus, instead of a world of becoming in which all unfolds
itself with complete determmism, because all phenomena
are matenally real, we have a world unfolded in time and
space by the Jack-in-the-box appearance of new and un-
predictable quahties. Such a philosophy is incompetent to
explain society or the generation either of itself or other
philosophies. It cannot heal duahsm.

H* ^33

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

It gives rise to the question, if these qualities are not
determined but imposed, who imposes them‘> We thus
return to a very early philosophy, to a god determining but
Himself self-determined, outside "the Universe, who
arbitrarily pumps in these qualities into a passive
world It makes no difference whether, as with Bergson,
such a god exists now or, as with Alexander, such a god
exists m the future and is continually attracting these
qualities out of the world, as the sun raises blisters on the
skin.

These new bourgeois evolutionary philosophies which
start out to be dialectical and scientific, end by being less so
than the older bourgeois philosophies. The world becomes
an amorphous mass lying in Time and Space with no deter-
mining relations between its phenomena, for all values are
imposed upon it m an arbitrary way, as if it were a piece of
dough. Such philosophies fail in their primary motive, that
of synthesising bourgeois philosophy. Should anyone wish
to have the melancholy proof of this, they need only read
Alexander’s Space^ Time and Deity, which proves his
philosophy to be inadequate even to contain relativity
physics.

Indeed, unless such a philosophy can penetrate to the seat
of bourgeois dualism — its genesis in the society that pro-
duced It — It cannot escape from dualism, it cannot reconcile
duahsm, any more than the separate boughs of a tree can be
‘reconciled’ if we cannot see the trunk. Mechanical material-
ism and absolute idealism represent the extremest possible
antitheses of bourgeois dualism, and any philosophy which
does not reconcile them is doomed to be a less logical
philosophy. Bergson is as good an example as any of the
bourgeois who, striving to escape from bourgeois categories,
m fact falls back into them. He attempts to describe an
evolutionary world, but at the end, all he has is a static

^34

REALITY

world, whose mass is moved on by an external elan Mtal
He attempts to describe a world in which Time is real,
because the past is conserved m the present But his past
conserved in the present is a world in which Time is unreal,
because the qualities which make the past present are not
temporal, they are products of an outside force, Life, and
Time therefore becomes merely the empty stage of their
exhibition.

Bergson attempts to describe a world in which mind has
significance, and is real, but he creates a world in which
mind, because it is separate from matter and plays on it as
organ, is a complete machine without mind. All sensa, all
values, and all qualities are either not in the world, and are
therefore an unreal fagade, or are in the world, in which case
they are not mental. He endeavours to pose intuition as a
S3mthesis of instinct and intelligence He attempts to escape
from metaphysical dualism, and the weakness of formal
logic — that nothing emerges which is not already there — ^but
he only does so by demarcating instinct and intelhgence as if
they were entirely separate things. But this is not so; all
instincts have intelhgent modifications, and are conditioned
by experience. All intelligence utilizes orgamc instruments
(the brain, existing reflexes). The difference is a matter of
degree. By mabng it absolute, Bergson achieves as his new
term, intuition. What is his intuition? Exactly what he is
trying to escape from — scholasticism ! Intuition, as Bergson
visualises it, solves problems ‘by pure thought’, and not as
problems are m fact solved— by instinct, modified by experi-
ence, becoming increasingly conscious and therefore m-
creasingly intelligent Now this solving of problems without
modification by practice, is precisely the method of meta-
physics and logic— of all the rationalism which Bergson
rightly condemns for its stenhty. Thus Bergson’s intuition
is not a synthesis of two contradictions. The contradiction

235

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

is not between instinct and intelligence, but between
instinctive action and conscious thought, and the synthesis
IS science, a positive activity which on the one hand changes,
the world to man’s instinctive desires hnd, on the other hand
changes man by making him more conscious of reahty.
But Bergson, revolting against metaphysics, produces simply
an extreme form of rationalism, his ‘intuition’.

All these late bourgeois philosophies fail in this one
elementary requirement'

(1) ‘Do they explain (that is, include) all the scientific
discoveries of their era, in the one framework?’

Not one of them is competent to do this. There are two
other requirements:

(2) ‘Do they include, as real and umfied, all forms of
experience — colours, sounds, values, aims, time, space and
change*^’

(3) ‘Do they account, not only for these, but for the
evolution of all the various arts, sciences, and religions in
their historical evolution, and for their own explanation of
them? In other words, do they explain not only the objects
of experience, but the evolution of explanations of these
objects, both in their truth and their falsity?’

Obviously a philosophy which achieves these goals has
transformed itself into a sociology, but it is a measure of the
poverty of bourgeois philosophy that not only does it fail m
all attempts at solving the first question, but the very need
to solve the other two hardly presents itself. When one
views, in their contemporary cultures, the achievements of
Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Kant and Hegel, it is possible to
reabse how far-reaching has been the dissolution of bour-
geois culture. It IS even possible for M. Maritain, speaking
as a Thomist, to hurl insults at contemporary bourgeois
philosophy

‘The drama of Western culture consists in the fact that its
236

REALITY

Stock of common metaphysics has been reduced to an
utterly inadequate mmimum, so that only matter holds it
together, and matter is incapable of keeping anything
together.’ '

It IS not either matter or metaphysics that is responsible
for the decomposition of bourgeois culture, but the social
anarchy rooted in its economy. But whatever the cause,
this decomposition has now advanced to a stage where a
Scholastic philosopher can reproach the bourgeois phil-
osophers with a ‘betrayal’ of reason and with an ‘incoherent’
world-view. Would not Newton, Galileo, Bacon and
Descartes turn in their graves if they knew the time had come
when a medievahst could reproach their heirs with a
‘betrayal of reason’ ? Nothing could reveal more clearly the
retrogression of bourgeois philosophy.

Because bourgeois intellectual confusion is rooted in the
form of society of which it is a product, it cannot attain to
the consistent world-view of dialectical materiahsm without
seeing what is the law of motion of this society that produces
bourgeois philosophy, and what will be its outcome But
when one has seen that, one has ceased to be bourgeois;
one no longer stands in one’s own light and can see bour-
geois culture clearly. One has become a Communist.

« » « W

This transition, which involves understanding in oneself
all the formulas and conventions imposed by one’s bourgeois
upbringing and denving therefrom something more funda-
mental, IS not easy. Thus many even of those people who
see clearly the bankruptcy of capitahsm, and the analytical
power of Marxism, are unable to grasp the synthesis They
remain bourgeois, and therefore they impose on themselves
the task of ‘improving’ or ‘modifying’ dialectical material-
ism. They propose to bring it ‘up-to-date’, by modifying it

237

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

according to the lessons learned from recent scientific
development.

They do not see that such a programme is simply one of
making dialectical materialism bourgeois — making it more-
over not classical bourgeois, which could merely mean
dissolving it into the Hegelianism or mechanical materialism
of which it is the outcome, but degenerate bourgeois, making
it Bergsonian or Machian. They do not see that the task
vis-d-vis dialectical materialism and the latest developments
of bourgeois science is not that of bringing dialectical
materialism up to date, but that of bringing these anarchic
developments up to date by synthesising them in the con-
sistent world-view of Marxism This is obvious, for on the
one hand one has a coherent system — dialectical materialism
— and on the other hand one has a chaotic confusion of
‘discoveries’ — relativity physics, quantum physics, Freudism,
anthropology, genetics, psycho-physiology, which are based
on exclusive assumptions and contradict or ignore each
other. If there is to be any relation between these two groups
at all, obviously dialectical materialism must impose its
coherence on the mish-mash, and not the mish-mash its
incoherence on dialectical materialism. The second pro-
gramme is simply pointless. It would be better to leave
things as they are.

Of course in practice all who set themselves the second
programme perform it in a typically bourgeois way.
Whatever the particular closed world of bourgeois ideology
they inhabit — physics, psychology, economic, philosophy,
art, or religion — ^it is the limited and exclusive categories of
that world they would enforce on the universal categories of
dialectical materialism. The dialectical materialism so
‘improved’ is not only therefore now inadequate to take in
all the other closed worlds that this particular bourgeois
renovator does not inhabit, but soon proves itself as in-

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REALITY

capable as ordinary bourgeois philosophy of deahng com-
pletely even with the closed world m which resides the expert
in modernising Necessarily so, for the closed world is just
the characteristic of Bourgeois bankruptcy.

To return to the question with which this essay began:
Can physics, in its final stages of relativity, be restored to
the world of real experience'^ Can I, as I hve, remember,
think, move, see and act, find in that concrete immediate
experience the refined concepts of relativity physics'^ Not
only can I, but I must^ for relativity physics is extracted
from perception and expenence, just as is Newtoman
physics The fall of an apple, the passage of light, the motion
of earth and sun, the weight of objects, all these expenenced
perceived realities gave a common content to Newtonian
and Emsteinian hypothesis. But there was also a difference,
and this too owed its existence to an experience — ^to the
Michelson-Morley experiment. And the confirmation of the
later theory was due to experience, to seen things, the pre-
cession of the penhelion of Mercury, the bendmg of hght
rays by gravitation, and the gam m mass of w particles
Therefore all the entities of this physics whose form
could be determined by expenence, must exist m
expenence.

I live, therefore I think I am I have experience whether I
perceive or reflect and this is common to both feehngs, that
I endure. T,’ a thing that remains unchanged. But this ‘F
pndures; it lives It sees, suffers, thinks of things that are not
the same, for sometimes it has suffering, sometimes joy.
Sometimes it sees one tiling, sometimes another. And yet it
IS always the T’, the unchanging thing, that sees and suffers.
So that this always like ‘F, is also unhke, continually, new
things emerge and yet my perception of these things shows
the same element m their behaviour to me. They too endure,
and yet they change. Always there is a hke perpetually

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

manifesting unlike, continually there is unlikeness revealing
a like. This is experience, or becoming.

Becoming, because I remember. First I suffered, then I
rejoiced, then I feared. Suffering, Pdid not know of the
rejoicing or the fear. Rejoicing, I 'remembered’ the suffer-
ing, it tinged my rejoicing; but I did not yet know fear.
Fearing at last, I remembered that I had rejoiced with a
memory of suffering, and suffered but with no memory of
fear or rejoicing. All my feehngs could be arranged in that
order, in which the subsequent included memories of the
precedent, but not vice versa. This order of feelings I called
‘Time’. Every item in it had this unlikeness which yet
could by memory range them m a unique order.

But not my perceptions of things. These things had an
order among themselves. I could go to a thing, and then
walk to another thing, and then it appeared that, exactly
retracing my steps, I could come on the original thing.
Exactly retracing my steps, here was a difference. For I
could experience a thing; then experience another thing,
then return to the original thing and yet remember not only
my experience of another thing, but my earlier experience of
the original thing. Thus I had no unique endless order, but
a closed order which I could repeat m endless ways. All
these repetitions, these recurrences, could be ranged m this
hkeness upon unlikeness. I called this ‘Space’.

And now I was able to distinguish more sharply between
my own feelings, which were always m Time, in a unique
order, and things, which were ranged m Space, in an order
not umque but closed.

I was inchned to separate Time from Space, and my
feelings from things; but this was wrong. They were differ-
ent; they were opposite; but how could I say they were
exclusive, for the relations between them were just what
experience was? Every experience contained a feeling, a

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REALITY

newness, a knowledge that Time had moved on, and a thing,
an oldness, a knowledge that I had met this before I who
had the feelings of difference, yet remained I. I remained I
because I myself was h thing— a body. The things, whose
relations remained repeatable and non-unique, caused the
change m my feelings Every experience contained subject
and object, time and space. I discovered I could never
separate them m experience. How could the statement that
they were absolutely separate therefore have meamng?
Moreover Time and space always contained an expenence
or relation between things. How then could the statement
that things had relations in Time and Space, conceived as
neutral containers, have meaning*^ It was just my experience
in my relations with things, which gave me my ideas of time-
relations and space-relations. How could these relations
exist without terms, as things-in-themselves'^ If I made this
mistake (and for a time I did make it) it was one for which
I had no warrant. It led me into all kinds of paradoxes, so I
gave It up, and set out to measure and classify and compare,
not happenings m Time and Space, but the time and space in
happenings

How did I carry out this important task*? First of all by
the invention of numbers. All quahties, all elements in the
flux of experience, are becoming. There is a likeness, a
something that changes, and an unhkeness, the changeful-
ness of this thing. Moreover there are not merely bundles of
likeness and unhkeness, but all qualities can be arranged in a
unique order, such that event A is 'memorably’ contamed
in B, event B in C, event C in D. This 'nesting’ of events
involves that there is something common to all events.
Thus, in the series just named, quahty A is common to aU
events. Expenence never finds an end to the events in either
direction.

This gives us the series of integers; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. The
241

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

senes is dialectic, each number synthesises (memorably
contains) every previous number, and yet contains a new
quality, for how otherwise could we diifferentiate it*^ This
senes is thus adequate to describe all quantities, for it
describes the essential process of becoming.

But the series is not unique. 2 may be determined by 1
and 1, or I and 4, and so on. Each quality is then the limit
of an infinite number of different possible series.

Let us take two things — two likenesses. We take a thing
here, where I am now, and a thing there where I am not now.
We measure the number of like events between these things.
For example we ourselves pace backwards and forwards
(9 steps on each journey, 9 events). This is a like relation.
The original thing returned to after our pacing has changed,
but because there is a likeness recogniseable beneath the
change we call it The same thing’.

Thus space becomes a relation between ourself and things.
We pace between things. We never find distance except as a
relation between ourselves and things (ourselves pacing,
measuring, and watching). Distance becomes the measure-
ment of like events among themselves by us.

Just because the two sets of nine like events also had an
element of unlike and were arranged inclusively in our
memory in the series 1-9 and 10-18, they were valid as a
measurement of like things* Thus we find an element of
unlikeness in all our relations of like things determining
them. Time always figures in space.

We decide to find how little time need figure in space.
Time is the element of unlikeness, what is the minimum?
In the pacing of like events forward or back between things,
there is always this unlikeness. The fewer the events, the
less the unlikeness. We find that of all relations involving
hkeness and unlikeness, the light ray can mediate between
things with the least unlikeness in contemporary events.

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REALITY

This relation, the light relation, is therefore the most spatial
relation between events. It is a mmimum relation. A
minimum relation is unique. We therefore have a mimmum
relation which, when i*t occurs between two thmgs, involves
the least element of unhkeness between all other related
qualities m the world. This mimmum relation we call zero
interval, but, discovering the same relation m a different
sphere, we call this mmimum relation the quantum. Zero
interval is the least unhkeness in the universe which will
differentiate ‘between’ things, and make them different m
space. The quantum is the least unhkeness in things which
will integrate a thing and make it the same in time.

What is the most temporal relation? It is that relation
which has the most hkeness m it. But we recognise things
as ‘knots’ of likeness. Therefore the greatest possible hke-
ness m relations inheres within what we call a thing. While
qualities are emerging in experience, those which show most
likeness have as their relation maximum interval, which is
the most spatial relation We say, this thing follows a geo-
desic, The geodesic relation is the relation a thing’s qualities
have among themselves and therefore it is the most temporal
relation. Discovering the same relation m a different sphere,
we call it an electron.

But now we close the circle. This likeness is only evi-
denced m a bunch of relations. It is an intersection of
qualities ; the most like element in them But m each quality,
because we can distinguish between the qualities, there is an
unhkeness. The electron never exists in itself, always it is
manifesting unlikenesses. But the light interval, although it
connects two different things, yet connects them, and there-
fore IS the result of an element of likeness in its opposed
terms.

# * * * ^ *

What world follows from all this‘s
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FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

{a) Time and space are the way we sort the quahties in
which material things participate Each sorting is different
for each thing; therefore each has its own time and space.
There is nothing outside this emergence of qualities, not
even relations, for eveiy quality contains a subject, a rela-
tion, and an object (the rest of the universe). These qualities
are discontinuous and have a minimum, the quantum or the
light ray, and a maximum, the characteristic of following a
geodesic and being matter, but neither is separate from the
other. The quantum is the unit of time, the electron of
space, but each is involved in the other, each emerges from
the one material becoming of experience.

All these qualities, according to their difference and like-
ness, can be sorted in a unique senes z.c. the Universe is
completely determined. The senes nowhere holds back on
Itself; no sphere is self-determined. The series is not time,
time merges from the subject-object analysis; time is con-
tained m the senes, but only as the ‘perspective’ of one
particle. This is true also of space.

Time, like space, is thiee-dimcnsional (past, present,
future) But because time is an accretion of unlikenesses,
these three dimensions always distinguish themselves.
Those of space must be distinguished, because space is an
accretion of likenesses. That is why wave mechanics requires
six dimensions to describe the relation of two electrons, for
there is never a relation between two electrons only, but
between an electron and the rest of the world.

This is the world of experience as seen by dialectical
matenahsm. It is not only a world of experience, but also
a world of biology, psychology, sociology, art and physics.
Not only is it the world of relativity physics, but it is also,
and at the same time, the world of quantum physics.

The world,, in the process of becoming, exhibits an ac-
cumulation of unhkeness. Likeness has as one aspect

244

REALITY

organisation. This increase of unlikeness appears therefore,
as an increase of disorganisation. This is the ‘entropy
gradient , the basis of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

It is maintained by* bourgeois physics, however, that a
Universal return from disorder to order, i.e a return of the
series from A includes B, B includes C, to C includes B is not
impossible, but only grossly improbable. This is based on a
misunderstanding, due to the concept of Tune as the matrix
of becoming.

Time is in fact the inclusive senes of unlike quahties such
that A includes B, and B includes C. Consequently it is by
definition impossible to talk of such a series returning on
itself in time, for Time is the non-returning of the series.
The last of such a series that returned would be ‘past’.

If anyone could define Time in any other way, so as to
produce a more consistent world-view and upset our experi-
ence and the discoveries of relativity physics, then that would
no longer be the case. But until they do reach such a
formulation, no meaning can be assigned to a Umverse
which returns to a previous order from disorder. It is not
extremely improbable, but impossible, for it is a contradic-
tion in terms. If it happened, or could be shown to be
possible, it would indicate, not only that our present
definition of Time is wrong but also what Time really is.

The physicist, confronted by a small-scale infringement of
the law — e.g. gas gathenng into half of a receptacle and
leaving the other in a vacuum, would reason in this way:
‘Here is disorder becoming order, which is just what cannot
happen since it means the time in this receptacle has, so to
speak, gone backwards in comparison to my time. I there-
fore conclude that in fact it has not gone back, and that
there is a subsequency about the local accumulation of a
gas, which can only mean that it is part of a larger increase
in unlikeness or disorder. In other words I must assume

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FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

that this gas must have been acted upon by foices outside
itself, and that there is an outside cause for this behaviour.
If not, it IS my time that has gone backwards, and I am
living into the past. But this receptacle is too small for this
to be a necessary deduction ’

The concept of entropy involves that the system in which
entiopy must increase is self-determined and therefore un-
knowable and non-existent. The second Law of Thermo-
dynamics therefore only applies accurately to the whole
Universe and the probability it measures is really the degree
of its inaccuracy.

It follows from a dialectical world view that nothing is
absolute and self-determined but the Universe itself. The
complexity of men’s conscious relations with the Universe
may grow continuously, but they will never be co-incident
with the Universe. Their very increase is the generation of
new qualities which now form part of the unknown. Thus
nothing IS unknowable, because nothing is self-determined
or unmediated, but absolute knowledge is unattainable.
Every expression or vehicle of knowledge, every formulation
of consciousness, is incomplete. It does not ‘contain’ an
error, but its hmited truth is determined by its limited error.
The elimination of its error does not give us absolute truth;
a new hypothesis is required synthesising them m an ampler
statement. This can only come about if the error in the
former hypothesis has been revealed in practice — if the
contradiction implicit m it has become overt, and truth and
error have flown asunder, generating a new truth. Man
therefore learns by his mistakes. The discovery of an error
is the discovery of a new truth, for, if the error is discover-
able, the new truth is now knowable. This is the ‘unity of
truth and error’, and it is not a ‘mysticism’ of dialectics, but
is a description of a process common to the methodology of
science and hfe.

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REALITY

Are we therefore, as dialectical materialists, supporters of
Vaihinger’s 'Als Ob^ ^ and the value of fictions? No, for
to believe in the absolute value of error as an end is to be
as limited as to behevein an absolute truth. In dialectics an
error cannot be tolerated. The antagomsm between truth
and error is real. Once known, once this negation has
revealed itself, the mtolerableness of error prevents thought
from restmg upon it, and man moves on to a new truth.
But according to Vaihmger, man is consciously content
with error and rests on it. Thought loses its impetus.
Vaihinger’s view remams a metaphysical bourgeois doctrme.
He IS a positivist: his position is that reality is unknowable.
Since entities are unknowable in themselves, everythmg that
works IS as true as it is possible for a thing to be true.

But dialectics, if it is to justify its programme, must
explain the origin of this ‘tired’ bourgeois philosophy. It
must leave no sphere self-determined. It must close the
changing circle of being. Why has duahsm wrecked
bourgeois philosophy‘s Why was Platonism ‘congealed’ and
not dialectical? Why is Marxism dialectical?

If no sphere is self-determined, ideology must be in a
mutually determining relation with the society of which it is a
product. They must fit each other, at every level, like hand
and glove, like river and nver bed, for philosophy is a social
product. This arises from the very fact that we can talk
about society. The private thoughts of an individual are
inaccessible, the desires of a man to do something are
invisible. But as soon as man’s thoughts issue m language,
in concepts, m a coherent system, they become social. They
have adopted social forms: language and ideas, evolved by
the process of society. Such a public system of thought is a
social product. And as soon as man’s desires to do some-
thing result m action, m the moulding of matenal into
* The Philosophy of 'As /jT. (Kegan Paul )

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

something socially recognised as having use and value, here
too aim becomes end, desire becomes a social product.
Thought and will are private and personal, a philosophy and
a commodity are social products. Yet thought and will,
though private, are determined by the philosophy and
material products of the society into which a man is bom.
What I am taught and what I see round me, influence what
I think about, and what I desire.

Thus thought is naturally dialectic in so far as it is part
of the process of society. At each stage thought and material
being are flung apart and return on each other, in mutual
determinism, generating the new qualities of society. How
then does thought become congealed? Bourgeois revolt
gives rise to mechanical materialism. This in turn generates
idealism. But these two opposites cannot be reconciled
within the framework that produced them. All thought
that remains within these two poles becomes non-dialectic.
It becomes barren logic-chopping. The true synthesis is
Marxism; but Marxism is revolutionary; it rests on a revolu-
tion of the class structure of society. It is the class structure
of society that is holding back the dialectical movement of
thought. The poverty of bourgeois philosophy is rooted in
the breakdown of bourgeois economy. These outworn pro-
duction relations are holding back the productive forces of
society, holding back not merely the full produce of idle
factory plants, derelict coffee plantations, unploughed fields
and unemployed men, but of human brains.

» » » * *

We know the bourgeois illusion to be a reflex of the class
structure of bourgeois society. The first stage is the bourgeois
revolt; T am free in so far as I throw off all social restraint.’
Man, by the insurgent exercise of his desires, can dominate
his environment, not as master dominates slave — such

S48

REALITY

relations are banned— not by a simple fiat of his will— but
as an owner dominates his property, as a craftsman domi-
nates his tool, a farmer his land — by knowmg its laws. Tlie
bourgeois sees the envitonment as his tool in the first stage of
the boutgeois development.

This first dialectic movement of the revolutionary
bourgeoisie gives rise to Elizabethan tragedy, to the explora-
tion of the world, to Spanish and Tudor moonarchy, to
Galileo, to the splendid conation of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, finally to Newtonism and Cartesian-
ism. The discovery of the ‘law of gravity’, of analytical
geometry, of the farthest hmits of the world, marks the
crescendo of the bourgeois explosion into the environment.
The bourgeois has now seized the environment as tool. The
mechanical materialistic philosophy of Hobbes, Condillac,
D’Holbach, and the hke expresses the hmit of the vast social
movement which has already, in reaching the hmit, clearly
revealed its opposite. This is the apogee (1750) of the first
stage of capitalism

For from the environment, dominated as a tool m the
extraverted, exploring period of social relations, we now
pass to the bourgeois himself in the introverted analytical
period. All the bourgeois acts of will at first flow into the
environment, and are there reahsed. This is not in his
opinion a determining relation, for the bourgeois is, by his
initial revolution, free in himself. Because therefore this is
not a mutually determining relation, because he knows as it
were by simple inspection, he has no two-way connexion
with his environment. He has no guarantee that the environ-
ment known by him has an independent existence. If it
determined his knowing, even as his knowing determined it,
this would perforce constitute independent existence on its part.
But the bourgeois demes this! Hence Berkeley, Hume,
Kant, Comte, and neo-positivism. In this second stage of

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FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

bourgeois economy we have the birth of idealism. The
environment either does not exist, or is unknowable. Mind
IS primary.

This development is the result of fndustrial capitalism, of
the terrific power over its environment manifested by the
machine. This makes it seem as if the mind is eveiything,
and the environment nothing. It makes mind seem the sole
active force generating all quality.

Society can only seem to be the success of individual will,
in an economy in which men act as if their sole actions are
undetermined and primary. The bourgeois producing for
the market, free from all social control and restraint, believes
that in doing what seems most to fulfil his will to profit, he
is free The market, the regulator of bourgeois economy,
stands to him as environment, and shields him from reality.

In fact his actions are determined by the market and the
market itself is determined by the completely blind actions
of thousands of men like himself, but the law of its determin-
ism IS unknown to him. There is no control, no awareness
of the relations between individual producers which detci-
mine slump and boom. Hence the bourgeois regards the
success of society m changing the environment, not as the
outcome of social laws, but as the outcome of free individual
mind, as the success of personal conation. When he is
sufficiently insulated from the environment by the develop-
ment of his class, this becomes idealism.

Such an idealistic philosophy is necessarily the philosophy
of a ruling class, with whom the environment seems to obey
their free will as will. The proletariat cannot generate such
a philosophy because this same capitalist economy exploits
them. It forces them to bring their labour power into the
market to sell to the best bidder or go empty away if there
is none. Its anarchy makes them unfree. It does not fulfil
their wills, it exploits them

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REALITY

The proletariat has a remedy, that of social organisation.
By combining into trade umons, and accepting social con-
straints, not haphazard but to a conscious end— higher
wages, better conditions— the workers secure the fulfilment
of their wills. And in the factories where they work, their
organisation is what gives labour its productivity.

Thus the proletariat, generated by the exploitation of
bourgeois economy, cannot accept any philosophy that sees
freedom in lack of social orgamsation and constraint, the
path of freedom, the road of fulfilment of desire On tlie
contrary, the only way they can reahse their wills is by
estabhshmg, in bitter fight, the organisations and social
restraints (Factory Acts, Right to Strike, etc) which the
bourgeois rejected. Thus the operation of bourgeois
economy generates its negation in its exploited class.

But this negation is not a return to medieval philosophy,
which bourgeois philosophy itself negated. Medieval social
restraints were unconscious, their organisations were not
planned to secure an end, they were rigid, inflexible, imposed
from above. They did not represent mass co-operation but
lord-and-slave domination. They were the product of a
class society.

Thus the philosophy enforced on one by being a member of
the proletariat, is higher than either feudal or bourgeois
philosophy. It IS nearer to reality; it mcludes them both.
It includes the organisation embodied consciously in feudal
society, but it does not permit these organisations to anse as
expressions of the privilege of a ruhng class. They anse
from the needs of the co-operative task, j’ust as to hft a huge
rock necessitates co-operative action by a gang of men and
this action is not imposed by a lord’s will, but by the shape
and weight of the stone and the nature of the tools available.

In Hegelianism the Idea becomes absolute, objective,
and creates the whole world This is the climax of bourgeois

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FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

philosophy. Concurrently bourgeois economy is reaching its
apex.

Up till then there had been no dualism m bourgeois
philosophy, only the dialectic yea' and nay of thought
generating greater complexity and subtlety. Up till then
there had been no strife between bourgeois social relations
and productive forces, only a tension generating still greater
fertility. But now this becomes dualism.

Formal logic is not a law of thought, it is a rule of sym-
bolism. If we are to denote social references by social
referents, if we are to indicate for social purposes socially
interesting events in the flux of becoming by discrete, per-
manent symbols, there is one elementary necessity

Each discrete permanent symbol must denote an entity on
which our actions will converge.

For example if by ‘this rock’ we sometimes mean a tree,
sometimes a cloud, there will be no social convergence.
But a language is designed to secure social convergence.
Hence ‘this rock’ must always secure social convergence.

This involves the so-called ‘Laws of thought’. The Law
of Contradiction, ‘a thing cannot both be A and Not-A,’
secures umdirection m social convergence. The Law of
the Excluded Middle, ‘a thing must be either A or Not-A,’
secures unanimity in social convergence.

Logical laws are therefore social. They are approximate
rules which must be obeyed if language is to fulfil a social
function. They are in no way true of the nature of reality
They do not in fact make any statement about the nature of
reahty. They merely make the following statement:

‘It is desirable to ensure co-opcration in the active
relation of society to reality.’

Of course this is tautologous, inasmuch as the existence
of a language implies not merely the recognition of this law,
but the fact that, even before language came into being,

252

REALITY

thsre must have besn social co-operation to bring it into
being. That is why logic is a late outgrowth from language.

Formal logic does not express the vital nature of reality,
but expresses certain abstract characteristics of social action.
Its laws are manifestly untrue as statements of reality. It is
not true that a thing is either A or not A. Yesterday it was
A, to-day it is not-A. It is not true that a thmg cannot
both be and not be A To-day I am ahve, some day I will
be dead. To-morrow I will or wiU not be dead. Both alter-
natives are equally true The use of the verb ‘is’ gives a
spurious truth to the methodological rules of logic: it
implies a universal instant; but this we know from relativity
physics to be impossible. There is only a social instant.
There is a ‘present’ common to members of society existing
and moving at roughly the same speed and in the same place
in the Universe and able therefore to undertake a co-
operative task. Outside this society, the ‘is’ becomes a ‘was’
or ‘will-be’, and the ‘laws’ of logic cease to be vahd. Even
within society logic is only approximately true. It is a rough
‘working’ rule like the absolute Time and Space of conversa-
tion and appointment-making which is also an unreal
social approximation

Social tasks show us change in reahty Our symbols must
be continually altered, our thoughts and forms continually
become quahfied and enriched. Our active contact with
reality ensures a continual dialectical change m thought and
perception, and the constant ingression of the new as the
result of our changing relations with it. Thought therefore
needs only to go out in action to remain dialectical; hence
the dialectical nature of scientific hypotheses. The hypo-
thesis goes out in the experiment and, as a ‘result’, becomes
changed, and returns upon the hypothesis to alter it. The
fresh hypothesis now gives rise to a fresh experiment. The
experiment, if it negates the hypothesis, produces a new one,

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FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

competent to synthesise both the negation and the original
hypothesis.

Whenever we see thought becoming non-dialcctical and
logical, there must be a breach betwdfen thought and action.

Instead of preoccupying itself with the changing subject-
object relation, mind preoccupies itself with the forms of that
symbolism which, in the past, has contained old dialectical
formulations of realities. This indicates a similar process in
society itself. The productive relations of society have
become separated and antagonistic from the productive
forces. The ruling class, the class whose philosophy
language expresses, has ceased to be fertile, and has with-
drawn and become merely parasitic. Thought has become
introverted. We see this emphasis on logic, formalism, and
withdrawal from action in the Hellenistic, Scholastic, and
modern bourgeois philosophies. We see it in all developed
philosophies, for the towering of philosophy as queen of
thought is itself the reflection of a class cleavage. The
development of logistic in contemporary thought is, like
neo-realism, a good example of this trend. Logistic is a pre-
occupation not with the use of mathematics but with the
nature of its symbolism As a result logistic has not gener-
ated a single new development in mathematical thought.

Dialectics is not therefore — as the Scholastics imagined
formal logic to be — a machine for extracting the nature of
reality from thought. It is the denial of the possibility of the
existence of such a machine. It is a recognition of mutually
determining relations between knowing and being. It is a
creed of action, a constant goad forcing the thinker into
reality. Thought is knowing, the experience is being, and at
each new step new experience negates old thought. Yet their
tension causes an advance to a new hypothesis more inclu-
sive than the old. When capitalism has generated at one
pole, the exploited proletariat, with unprecedented misery,

254

REALITY

and at the other end, the exploiting bourgeoisie, with unpre-
cedented wealth, a new quality emerges from their antagon-
ism, that of Communism. A synthesis of the contradictions
of bourgeois economy h^vmg come into bemg, these contra-
dictions are now revealed nakedly as truth and error.
Bourgeois philosophy now becomes stenle duahsm, and it is
proletarian philosophy or Marxism which is dialectic. But
because it is the task of the proletanat, arising from the
mode of their generation, to solve the problem of human
relations and of the gulf between knowing and bemg,
Marxism is more than a philosophy, it is a sociology. It is a
theory of the concrete society in which philosophy, and other
forms of ideology, are generated
Bourgeois philosophy, therefore, can generate no greater
philosophy than Hegel’s, any more than feudahsm could
generate anything higher than Thomism or Hellenism any-
thing more all-embracing than Platonism and Aristotelian-
ism. To rise beyond Hegel’s ideahstic synthesis, one must
see that the mind in its turn is determined by social relations,
that knowing is a mutually determining relation between
subject and object, that freedom is not accident but the
consciousness of necessity. One must see that if freedom for
a man in society is the attainment of individual desires, it
involves conscious co-operation with others to obtain them,
and that this conscious co-operation will itself transform a
man’s desires. To see this is to cease to be a bourgeois, and
to cease to tolerate bourgeois economy. One is already a
communist revolutionary. Bourgeois economy itself pro-
duces these, for to be shown that freedom does not he in lack
of social organisation is to be proletananised. It is to be
declassed, if one is a bourgeois or to be made class-conscious
if one is a proletarian. It is to find how helpless one is by
oneself to resist the dominating and exploiting relations that
are concealed in bourgeois economy.

FURTHER STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE

To have become a dialectical materialist is to have been
subject to exploitation, want, war, anxiety, insecurity; to
have had one’s barest human needs denied or one’s loved
ones tormented or killed in the name of bourgeois liberty,
and to have found that one’s ‘free-will’ alone can do nothing
at all, because one is more bound and crippled in bourgeois
economy than a prisoner in a dungeon— and to have found
that in tliis condition the only thing that can secure allevia-
tion is co-operation with one’s fellow men in the same
dungeon, the world’s exploited proletariat. This co-
operation Itself imposes on one’s actions laws deriving from
the nature of society and of the aims one has in common
with those others. Then one has ceased to be a bourgeois
philosopher: one has become a dialectical materialist. One
has seen how men can leave the realm of necessity for that of
freedom, not by becoming blind to necessity, or by denying
its existence, but by becoming conscious of it.